$105K Salary in Nashville vs. Atlanta: Tennessee's Grocery Tax Repeal vs. Georgia's 5.19% Income Tax and the Real Total Tax Burden Gap
You've got a $105,000 offer in Atlanta. You currently make $105,000 in Nashville. Same number on the offer letter, but you already know Tennessee has no state income tax and Georgia does — so this should be an easy call, right?
Then you see the news: Tennessee lawmakers are pushing legislation to eliminate the state's 4% grocery tax, the kind of headline that makes Nashville sound even cheaper. Meanwhile Georgia's income tax has actually been falling too, down to a flat 5.19% and still phasing lower. Two moving targets, one salary, and a decision that depends on more than which state taxes your paycheck.
This is exactly the kind of comparison that gets flattened into "no income tax = better" when the real answer requires stacking property tax, sales tax, and the fine print of what's actually exempt against each other. Let's do that math.
What Tennessee's Grocery Tax Fight Is Actually About
Right now, Tennessee taxes groceries at a reduced state rate of 4%, on top of which most counties and cities add a local option sales tax — commonly another 2 to 2.75 percentage points. As reported by ITEP (via WKRN), Tennessee lawmakers have introduced legislation to eliminate the state's grocery tax entirely, which would leave only the local portion in place.
This matters because Tennessee leans hard on sales tax to fund the state government it can't fund with income tax. The combined state-and-local sales tax rate across Tennessee runs around 9.55% on general purchases — one of the highest in the country. Groceries get a partial break already; full repeal of the state's share would push that further, but the local piece typically survives unless a given city or county acts separately.
Georgia, by contrast, already exempts groceries from its state sales tax, though some local jurisdictions layer a small local sales tax on top of grocery purchases. So even before you get to income tax, the two states are attacking the same problem — taxing what people need to survive — from opposite directions.
Georgia's Income Tax Is the Bigger Line Item
Georgia has been quietly cutting its income tax. The state moved to a flat rate structure in 2024, and that rate has stepped down each year it hits statutory revenue triggers — landing at 5.19% for the 2025 tax year, with a longer-term target of 4.99%. It's real money, but it's not nothing, and it applies to every dollar of your salary above the standard deduction.
That's a different calculation than what a lot of high earners moving to Georgia are actually weighing. Realtor.com recently covered Millie Bobby Brown and Jake Bongiovi's move from Hollywood to a Georgia farm property — the kind of relocation where the appeal isn't zero income tax (Georgia has one) but acreage and property cost per dollar compared to coastal markets. That's a useful reminder: people don't just move for the lowest tax state, they move for the combination of taxes, land, and housing that fits their specific budget. A flat 5.19% income tax on a $105K salary is a real number, but it can still be the right trade if property and housing costs come in low enough to offset it.
Nashville's appeal runs the other direction. Tennessee has no state income tax at all, which is part of why it's long been a landing spot for touring musicians and independent artists — Nashville-based acts like Jelly Roll build careers around irregular income, and a state that doesn't tax wages (or take a cut of royalties as ordinary income tax) changes the math on inconsistent-earner economics in a way a W-2 salary comparison doesn't fully capture. For a steady $105K salary, though, the income tax gap is simpler: it's $0 in Nashville versus roughly $4,800+ in Atlanta before credits.
This is the kind of analysis Vontari runs for you — so you don't have to build the spreadsheet yourself.
Property Tax: Same Home Value, Different Bill
Here's where the "no income tax state" story gets complicated. Tennessee's average effective property tax rate is low, around 0.56% statewide, and Davidson County (Nashville) runs close to that at roughly 0.64%. Georgia's average effective rate is higher, around 0.72% statewide, and Fulton County (Atlanta) typically runs closer to 0.85–0.90% once you include county, school, and city millage rates layered together.
On a $450,000 home — a reasonable stand-in for a mid-size single-family home in either metro, adjusted for what $105K can realistically finance — that gap looks like this:
| Cost category | Nashville, TN | Atlanta, GA |
|---|---|---|
| Property tax rate (effective) | ~0.64% | ~0.89% |
| Annual property tax on $450K home | ~$2,880 | ~$4,005 |
| State income tax on $105K salary | $0 | ~$4,830 |
| General sales tax (on ~$30K spending) | ~$2,865 (9.55%) | ~$2,157 (7.19%) |
| Grocery tax (on ~$9K groceries, current law) | ~$563 (6.25% local+state) | ~$270 (local only) |
| Estimated annual total | ~$6,308 | ~$11,259 |
Atlanta's total tax burden comes in roughly $4,950 higher per year than Nashville's on this profile — even though Georgia doesn't tax groceries at the state level and Tennessee, as of today, still does.
What Happens If Tennessee Repeals the Grocery Tax
If the legislation ITEP covered passes and Tennessee eliminates the state's 4% grocery tax, only the local portion (roughly 2.25% in Nashville) would remain. On $9,000 in annual groceries, that drops the grocery tax line from about $563 to about $203 — a savings of roughly $360 a year. It's real, but it's a rounding error compared to the income tax gap. Nashville's total burden would fall to around $5,948, widening the Atlanta gap to roughly $5,311 a year.
That's the pattern worth internalizing: grocery tax repeal makes a good headline, but state income tax is doing 90%+ of the work in this comparison. People fixate on the sales tax line because it's visible on every receipt — the income tax hit shows up once a paycheck and gets absorbed into withholding before anyone stops to add it up. If you want the number for your actual salary and spending pattern rather than this illustrative $105K profile, that's a calculation worth running for your specific situation at Vontari rather than eyeballing it off a rate table.
Housing Supply Is the Wildcard Neither Tax Table Captures
Tax burden is only half the picture, because it assumes you can buy a comparable $450,000 home in both cities — and that assumption is getting shakier. Homebuilding industry leaders recently pushed Congress for reforms to construction financing, arguing that tight lending conditions and elevated costs are constraining new supply just as demand holds up in growing Sunbelt metros, a dynamic Realtor.com covered from the U.S. Chamber's housing conference. Atlanta, still absorbing steady in-migration, has felt more of that supply pressure than Nashville in recent building cycles, which shows up as upward pressure on the price you'd actually pay for that $450K home — potentially eroding some of Nashville's tax advantage if Atlanta home prices are rising faster.
Contrast that with what Realtor.com dubbed "Niceville USA" — Des Moines, Iowa, which currently leads the nation in homebuilding activity relative to demand, keeping prices and rents in check even as other metros tighten. Des Moines isn't part of this Nashville-Atlanta comparison, but it's a useful benchmark for what an abundant-supply market looks like against a constrained one, and it's worth reading if you're weighing a Midwest option against either Sunbelt city — see our breakdown of $95K in Des Moines vs. Denver for how that plays out against a market with much tighter housing.
If you're specifically weighing Tennessee's no-income-tax model against other states, it's also worth comparing how that trade-off looks elsewhere: our posts on Nashville vs. Raleigh and Nashville vs. Miami both dig into how the "no income tax" headline holds up once housing and property tax enter the picture. And if Atlanta specifically is on your shortlist against a different flat-tax state, our Pittsburgh vs. Atlanta comparison walks through Georgia's housing costs against a lower-tax alternative.
What This Actually Means for Your Decision
At $105,000, Nashville comes out roughly $5,000 to $5,300 ahead of Atlanta on total tax burden per year, whether or not Tennessee's grocery tax repeal passes — because income tax, not sales tax on food, is what's actually moving the needle. That gap compounds: over a five-year stretch, it's north of $25,000 before you've factored in whether either city's housing market lets you buy the home you actually want at the price you can afford.
None of that makes Atlanta the "wrong" choice — a lower property tax rate in a no-income-tax state doesn't automatically beat a state income tax paired with more housing supply or a lower purchase price, and your actual spending pattern, home value target, and whether you itemize deductions can shift these numbers meaningfully. The only way to know for certain is to run your own salary, your own target home price, and your own spending against both states' actual rate schedules — not a $450K illustrative example.
That's what Vontari is built to do: model your specific offer against the state income tax, property tax, and sales tax rules of wherever you're actually comparing, so the decision is based on your numbers instead of a national average.
Sources
- WKRN: Tennessee Lawmakers Push New Legislation to End State Grocery Tax — Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy
- Millie Bobby Brown Welcomes Second Baby With Jake Bongiovi—After Trading Hollywood Glamour for Georgia Farm Life — Realtor.com News
- Homebuilding Leaders Call for Reforms To Boost Construction Financing and Cut Costs — Realtor.com News
- Jelly Roll Says He’d Abandon Music To Work at a Homeless Shelter: ‘If God Tells Me To’ — Realtor.com News
- Midwest City Known as ‘Niceville USA’ Leads the Nation in Homebuilding and Affordability — Realtor.com News