Taxing the Visiting Team

A professional football player spent two working days in California in 2017. On one, his Texas team traveled there. On the other, it played a preseason game. California taxed his pay for both days, and the state's Office of Tax Appeals upheld the assessment.¹

States and cities tax visiting athletes on the share of their salary earned inside their borders. Every road trip creates a tax return, and courts, city councils and contract lawyers keep changing the rules.

How a salary gets divided

Most states split an athlete's pay by duty days: every day the player works for the team, from the first day of preseason training through the last scheduled game. New York's rule names baseball, basketball, football, soccer and hockey teams directly. A player's New York income equals his total pay multiplied by his New York duty days divided by his total duty days.²

Duty days include far more than games. New Jersey counts practices, team meetings, promotional appearances and injury rehabilitation.³ Minnesota writes the same formula into state law and leaves out off-season days.⁴ California uses a general rule for all traveling employees that divides pay by the number of working days spent in the state.⁵

More opponents, more states

Baseball's schedule widened the map in 2023. Every club now plays every other club during the season, including 46 games against the other league.⁶ More opponents means more cities on the travel calendar and more governments with a claim on the paycheck.

Cleveland loses in court

Cleveland once taxed visiting players by counting games instead of duty days. The difference was large. NFL player Hunter Hillenmeyer worked 157 to 168 duty days a season and spent about two of them in Cleveland. In 2015 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the games-played method violated the due process rights of NFL players and that the city could tax only pay earned there under the duty-days method.⁷

The same day, the court ruled for Jeff Saturday, who missed the Cleveland game in question while rehabbing an injury in Indianapolis. Cleveland had no authority to tax him for a game he never attended.⁸

City taxes on top

Cities add their own charges. Philadelphia taxes nonresidents who work in the city at 3.425 percent of wages, effective July 1, 2026.⁹ A player earning $10 million over 180 duty days who spends three days in Philadelphia owes the city about $5,708 for that series.

Kansas City, Missouri, charges a 1 percent earnings tax and requires nonresidents to pay it on income earned inside city limits.¹⁰

California sets the top rate

California's top 2025 income tax bracket reaches 12.3 percent, and income above $1 million owes an extra 1 percent Behavioral Health Services Tax, for a top rate of 13.3 percent.¹¹ Wages also carry State Disability Insurance, which has applied to every dollar of pay since the state removed its wage ceiling on January 1, 2024.¹²

Deferred pay and the move home

The largest contracts now push pay into the future. Deferred compensation is salary earned now but paid years later. Federal law bars states from taxing the retirement income of people who no longer live there, including certain deferred pay spread over at least ten years.¹³

Shohei Ohtani's ten-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers defers $68 million of each $70 million annual salary. A California state senator estimated that Ohtani could avoid more than $90 million in state taxes if he lives outside California when the deferred money arrives. The state Senate passed a resolution urging Congress to cap the practice.¹⁴ The tax question shifts from where the player works to where he lives on payday.

States that dropped the tax

Some governments have walked away. Tennessee ended its professional privilege tax on NHL players for games after April 24, 2014, and on NBA players for regular season games after June 1, 2016.¹⁵

Everywhere else, the bill keeps traveling with the team. Player schedules are public, salaries are large and teams fix travel dates months ahead. No group of nonresidents is easier for a tax collector to find.