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Comment by tidepod12 | Hacker News Reader

>State personal income taxes are based on your legal domicile

Not in CA. The determination of your residency status for CA tax purposes is based on much more than just your legal home address. And even if you are classed as a nonresident, you still pay CA taxes on any income earned due to work in CA.

Texas and CA do not have any reciprocal tax agreements.

Source: live in Texas, travel for work a lot all over the country, including many months spent in CA, have had to file many income tax returns and determine residency status with the state of CA for exactly this purpose.

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> you still pay CA taxes on any income earned due to work in CA

I do exactly this. I earn income from a CA company, but live elsewhere. But I wouldn't characterize it as "paying".

Paychex withholds my CA taxes, which then get (nearly) fully refunded a week after filing. It's not exactly "paying" - rather, you're giving a zero-interest loan to the State of California with an average maturity of 6-7 months.

That's one situation, but when I said "earned due to work in CA" I meant work that is physically done in CA, not just work for a CA-based company.

For example, let's say I live in Texas and work for a Texas based company at a salary of $100k/yr. I spend most of my time in Texas, but I travel a lot for work and for 12 weeks of the year, I spend Monday through Friday in California.

Since I am a resident of Texas, I pay taxes on all of that $100k to Texas (but since TX has no income tax, it's moot).

However, I spent 12 weeks of that work in California, making me a nonresident worker in California. I owe CA income tax on $100k * (12 weeks spent in CA / 52 total weeks in a year) = ~$23k. If I have enough deductions in CA to offset that, I might end up owing nothing and any paid taxes might all get refunded to me. But if I don't have enough deductions, I might owe CA some tax money.

Thankyou for the clarification. In that case, Elon would need to move his businesses from California to Texas as well. In the mean time, I'm trying to figure out how are non California employees are not paying CA taxes. I suspect that he won't be paying CA taxes on his personal income.

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