Four words in an Arkansas statute: which states still tax alimony, and why no two do it the same way

In a decoupled state, alimony that does not appear anywhere on a federal return still moves money on the state one. The payer gets a deduction the federal government no longer allows. The recipient owes tax on income the IRS cannot see.

Support figures get negotiated against after-tax reality. If the arithmetic assumes the federal rule is universal, the number lands wrong for one of the two people at the table, and neither of them finds out until April.

What we expected to find was one mechanism repeated a few times. What we actually found was four states departing from the federal rule for four unrelated reasons, only one of which was a deliberate response to the 2017 Act.

New York decided not to follow

The only one of the four that is what people imagine decoupling to be. New York looked at the federal change and declined it, in a technical memorandum issued within days of the law taking effect. On a New York return you subtract alimony paid and add back alimony received, whenever the instrument was executed.

Source: NY Department of Taxation and Finance, TSB-M-18(6)I.

New Jersey was never coupled in the first place

New Jersey’s Gross Income Tax Act does not build on federal adjusted gross income. It defines income through its own closed list of categories, written decades ago, under which alimony is taxable to the recipient and deductible to the payer as a matter of New Jersey law.

So New Jersey did not decouple from the federal change. The federal change never reached it. There was no conformity to break.

Source: N.J.S.A. 54A:5-1(n) and 54A:3-2.

The Division of Taxation’s own guide, New Jersey Tax Guide: Divorcing Your Spouse, says the same: alimony is taxable to the recipient under N.J.S.A. 54A:5-1(n), and alimony paid under a divorce or separation decree is deductible. Payments made voluntarily, outside a decree, are not. On 27 October 2026 the Division’s Regulatory Services Branch confirmed this to The Cusp by email. That is correspondence, not a ruling, and not advice about any particular return.

California decoupled, and then stopped — this year

California did not adopt the change for instruments executed between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2025. The Franchise Tax Board states it flatly: “We do not conform to the federal Alimony changes effective January 1, 2019, through December 31, 2025.”

Under SB 711, that ended. For any instrument executed on or after 1 January 2026, California conforms — and a pre-2026 instrument keeps the old California treatment unless it is modified afterwards and the modification expressly says the amendments apply.

This is also where we got it wrong. Our own money page originally said California never adopted the federal change “for any agreement, whenever executed” — reasoning from California’s frozen conformity date rather than reading the FTB’s own alimony page. That was true of the old rule and wrong about the current one. It was live for about eleven hours. It is logged.

Source: California FTB, “Alimony”, last updated 7 January 2026; SB 711 (2025–2026).

Arkansas froze the federal rule in 1987

And here is the one worth the whole exercise.

Arkansas does not have a general conformity date for this. It has a statute that adopts the federal alimony provisions by name:

Title 26 U.S.C. § 71, in effect on January 1, 1987, is adopted for purposes of determining the amount of alimony or separate maintenance to include in the gross income of the recipient.Ark. Code § 26-51-417(a)

Arkansas incorporated a snapshot. Not a live reference to whatever federal law happens to say, but the text of those sections as they read on a specific day in 1987, carried forward as Arkansas’s own rule. When Congress repealed sections 71 and 215 thirty years later, nothing happened in Arkansas. The payer still deducts. The recipient still includes.

Arkansas confirmed it, and named the line. That reading came from the statute, so on 11 September 2026 we asked the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration whether we had it right. Its Individual Income Tax office replied the same day: alimony is claimed by the recipient as income earned, and the payer takes it off as an adjustment to gross income on the AR1000ADJ. The office attached its own 2025 instructions rather than paraphrasing them. So the treatment this page worked out from a cross-reference frozen in 1987 is the treatment Arkansas prints on its adjustments schedule today — the AR1000ADJ Adjustments Schedule and its published instructions.

Alabama has a statute that looks almost exactly like Arkansas’s. It also declines to use a conformity date. It also names sections 71 and 215 by number:

Alabama’s cross-references are still sitting in the code, pointing at provisions that have not existed since 2018. The result happens to be sensible: nothing includable, nothing deductible, which is where the federal rule lands anyway. But it gets there by accident rather than by decision.

We should be careful about how far we push that. It is our reading of the statutory text, not a published position of the Alabama Department of Revenue, which does not appear to have issued guidance on it. It is the ordinary reading and we think it is right. It is not a departmental confirmation, and the Alabama page says so.

We then checked twenty states for the same defect, prioritizing the ones that write item-specific rules instead of using a conformity date. Alabama is the only one. South Carolina has a genuinely vestigial name-check of section 71 in a technical clause, but it is not what makes alimony taxable there, so nothing turns on it. Mississippi points at “the federal rules” without naming a section, so it cannot dangle. Pennsylvania never taxed alimony at all — it is simply not one of the eight income classes Pennsylvania taxes.

Pennsylvania added a wrinkle when we asked. The Department of Revenue told us on 11 September 2026 that alimony is not subject to Pennsylvania Personal Income Tax — and that it is nevertheless counted in eligible income when working out whether someone qualifies for Tax Forgiveness. So in Pennsylvania alimony is untaxed and can still cost you a credit, which is the kind of thing that does not show up until the return is being prepared. The department pointed us at its own published answers: items not subject to Personal Income Tax and how to know if you qualify for Tax Forgiveness.

Maine, answered 11 September 2026. For twelve days this page said we could not establish Maine’s treatment. We could not retrieve a current statement from the state revenue department addressing alimony specifically, and we were not willing to infer a state’s tax treatment from a neighboring state or from a secondary summary. So we wrote and asked. Maine Revenue Services replied that Maine conforms to the Internal Revenue Code, as amended, through 31 December 2025 unless otherwise stated in Maine law, that there are at this time no Maine income modifications — additions or subtractions — for alimony, and that Maine therefore currently conforms to the federal tax treatment. That is an examiner’s answer in correspondence, not a published ruling or regulation, and we cite it as what it is: Maine Revenue Services, Income/Estate Tax Division, in correspondence, 11 September 2026. Read the date inside that answer as carefully as the date on it — Maine’s conformity is fixed to 31 December 2025, not rolling. If Congress changes the federal treatment of alimony after that date, Maine does not follow automatically; it follows only when the Legislature moves the conformity date.

Alabama was on that list too until we stopped looking for a conformity date and read the code itself. That is most of what this exercise taught us: the answer is usually where everyone keeps it, and occasionally it is somewhere nobody thinks to look.

How we got this. Eight state departments answered us directly on 11 September 2026, and two more on 14 September, because we wrote and asked rather than inferring. Maine Revenue Services, Income/Estate Tax Division, and the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue both replied on 11 September 2026, the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration confirmed the reading this page is named after and sent the form. The Utah State Tax Commission confirmed that Utah follows the federal treatment — which is what this page already said — and, asked why, explained the mechanism: the Utah return begins with federal adjusted gross income, so alimony arrives inside a number carried over from the federal return and Utah has no line of its own that could change it. That is how most of the thirty-seven reach the federal answer, and Connecticut stated it most precisely of all: alimony reaches the Connecticut return inside federal adjusted gross income, carried from the federal Form 1040 to Line 1 of the Connecticut return, and Connecticut has no subtraction modification for it. Which means the federal cutoff decides the Connecticut answer too. A Connecticut recipient under a pre-2019 order that has never been modified is still under the old federal rules, so the money is still in their federal adjusted gross income, so it still lands on Line 1 — and Connecticut taxes it. The same person under a post-2018 order pays Connecticut nothing on it. Same money, different tax, decided by the date on the instrument. The Rhode Island Division of Taxation described the same route — the federal AGI arrives on line 1A and nothing in Rhode Island touches it — the West Virginia Tax Division confirmed that West Virginia follows the federal rules, including for an older order later modified; and Arizona’s tax policy desk answered the whole question at once — Form 140 starts from federal adjusted gross income, there is no Arizona addition or adjustment for alimony, and Arizona conforms to the Internal Revenue Code as of 1 January 2026. Arizona sent that as a Statement of General Guidance, which is advisory and not binding on the department, and we cite it as exactly that. Arizona then answered the vintage question directly. On 28 September 2026 the Department wrote that Arizona “is a fixed-date conformity state and conformity has been adopted through 1/1/26”, and quoted A.R.S. § 43-105(A) verbatim: the Internal Revenue Code “in effect on January 1, 2026… but excluding any changes to the code enacted after January 1, 2026”. We read the statute ourselves and it matches word for word. That reply is an information letter rather than a private taxpayer ruling, and we cite it as that. It also moves Arizona out of the column we had it in: the date was previously ours, read off the session law, and it is now the Department’s own. The North Dakota Office of State Tax Commissioner answered on 14 September 2026, in one sentence: North Dakota follows the federal treatment of the taxability of alimony payments. That settles the treatment and not the vintage, so we established the vintage separately, from the Century Code rather than from the reply — N.D.C.C. § 57-38-01(5) defines the Internal Revenue Code as the Code of 1986 as amended, with no date and no freeze, and § 57-38-01(13) computes an individual’s taxable income under that same Code as amended. North Dakota is rolling, which makes it the counterexample to the four dated states below rather than a fourth of the same kind: a later federal change reaches North Dakota on its own, without the Legislature moving anything. We checked the route on the form as well — 2024 Form ND-1 begins at “federal adjusted gross income from Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 11”, and not one of its addition or subtraction lines touches alimony — so North Dakota reaches the federal answer the same way Connecticut, Rhode Island and Utah do, and the date on the instrument decides it there too. The Minnesota Department of Revenue answered the same day, and it took two replies to get there. One division pointed us to Revenue Notice 98-18, which is live on the department’s own site and does not answer this question — it is about how a nonresident apportioned the federal alimony deduction on Schedule M-1NR for 1995, 1996 and 1997, issued after the Supreme Court decided Lunding v. New York Tax Appeals Tribunal on 21 January 1998, and its worked example runs off line 30a of the 1997 Form 1040 — a deduction the 2017 federal Act repealed for instruments signed after 2018. We mention it because it is the kind of page that looks like an answer. A second division gave the answer: Minnesota follows the federal treatment, it conformed to the 2017 change in the 2019 legislative session, and it conforms to the Internal Revenue Code as amended through 1 May 2026. We checked that date rather than taking it, and checking it is what nearly went wrong: the codified text published by the Revisor still reads 1 May 2023, and the section carries a banner saying it has been affected by the 2026 session. The session law settles it — 2026 Minn. Laws ch. 128, art. 1, § 2 and § 3 strike 2023 and write 2026 into both places the date lives, Minn. Stat. § 290.01 subd. 19(f) and subd. 31. Minnesota is a dated state, not a rolling one, and at 1 May 2026 it carries the latest vintage of the four below. Montana took two attempts and is the better for it. The first reply, on 14 September 2026, referred us to another agency that “should be able to provide MCA laws” — the Montana Code Annotated being published free by the Legislature, that was a redirection rather than an answer. So we read the code ourselves. Then a tax examiner at the Department answered properly the same afternoon, unprompted, and confirmed the reading exactly: for instruments finalized before 31 December 2018 alimony is taxable to the recipient and deductible by the payer unless later modified to say otherwise, and for instruments finalized after that date it is neither, “following federal tax changes that Montana follows”. We record the redirection because it happened, and we record the answer because it settles the question — and because a department that routes a question to someone who can answer it has done the right thing, slowly. MCA § 15-30-2101(14) defines the Internal Revenue Code as the Code of 1986 as amended, or as it may be labeled or further amended — no date, no freeze — and § 15-30-2120(1) applies Montana’s additions and subtractions to federal taxable income. The words alimony, spousal and maintenance do not appear anywhere in § 15-30-2120. Nothing is added and nothing is taken away, so alimony arrives inside federal taxable income and is never adjusted out. Montana follows the federal treatment, and like North Dakota it follows automatically. This is the method working at its most useful: we do not need a department to be helpful, only to be right, and we can check that without them. Where a department answered in correspondence rather than in a published document, we say so on the page, we date it, and we do not name the individual who replied.

Four of these states have a date on them. Conformity is not a permanent arrangement; it is a cross-reference with a vintage, and the vintage matters. Maine conforms to the Code as amended through 31 December 2025 — 36 M.R.S. § 111(1-A), set by P.L. 2025 ch. 650 Pt. K, and Maine Revenue Services’ own summary of the 2026 session confirms the date was not advanced. Virginia’s General Assembly replaced rolling conformity with a fixed date of 31 December 2025, announced 20 February 2026 and still standing in the Department’s 2026 Legislative Summary of 6 July, so it held through the whole session. Arizona’s tax policy desk gave 1 January 2026, and the session law agrees: H.B. 4168, signed 13 June 2026, updates A.R.S. § 43-105 to the Code in effect on 1 January 2026 and excludes anything Congress enacted after it. Arizona’s own conformity page still describes 1 January 2024. That is the second revenue department in a week whose published explainer sits behind its own legislature, which is why we now read the session law and not the explainer. Minnesota’s 2026 Legislature moved its date forward to 1 May 2026, the latest of the four. All four dates fall years after the 2018 federal repeal, so all four follow the current federal treatment of alimony today. But a fixed date is a promise about the past, not the future: if Congress changes the federal rule after that date, the state does not follow until its legislature moves the date. Rhode Island, Utah and West Virginia described the mechanism without giving a date, and we have not inferred one for them.

The full fifty-state table →
Getting your finances in order — the national money page, in three tracks depending on whether you earn more, less, or about the same.
What sixteen state revenue departments told us — their written answers on how each taxes alimony, dated and in their own words.

Method: every state’s position was traced to a revenue department publication, a statutory conformity provision, or the state tax code itself. No law firm, tax-preparation company or directory site was cited as authority for anything in this piece. Where a fact could not be confirmed from a primary source it is recorded as unestablished rather than filled in.