Four words in an Arkansas statute: which states still tax alimony, and why no two do it the same way
Four words in an Arkansas statute are the difference between two states that look identical and behave in opposite ways. We read all fifty states’ tax codes to find out who still taxes alimony. The answer is stranger than the question.
Published 30 August 2026 · Every claim below is traced to a state revenue department, a conformity statute, or the tax code itself. Corrections at thecusp.app/corrections — including one we made on this exact subject and fixed within a day.
Since 1 January 2019, federal law has treated alimony as invisible. For any divorce or separation instrument executed after 31 December 2018, the person paying gets no deduction and the person receiving owes no tax. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not tinker with the old rules — it repealed them outright, striking sections 71 and 215 from the Internal Revenue Code.
An old order can be pulled into the new rules. The cutoff is not simply the date on the original decree. A divorce or separation instrument executed before 2019 and modified after 2018 also falls under the new treatment — but only if the modification expressly says so. The Internal Revenue Service puts it this way in Publication 504: the post-2018 rules apply to an instrument executed before 2019 and modified after 2018 “if the modification expressly states that the alimony isn’t deductible to the payer or includible in the income of the recipient.” So two people with a 2015 order, one modified in 2024 with that language and one modified without it, are taxed under different regimes. If you have modified an older order, the wording of the modification is the thing to look at, not the year on the original.
Almost everything written for divorcing people since then has treated that as the end of the story. It is not, and the gap between the federal answer and the state answer is worth real money to real people in four states. We could not find anyone publishing a fifty-state answer, so we went and got one.
Why this matters before it gets interesting
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.
A settlement modeled purely on federal treatment is mispriced in four states — and in one of them, mispriced differently depending on whether the instrument was signed in December or January.
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.
The four, and why each is different
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.
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.
Two Californians with identical orders signed six weeks apart, either side of 1 January 2026, have different state tax positions for the entire life of the order.
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.
The Alabama twin, and the four words that separate them
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:
| State | What the statute says | Effect of the 2017 repeal |
|---|---|---|
| Arkansas § 26-51-417 | Adopts 26 U.S.C. §§ 71 and 215 “in effect on January 1, 1987” | None. The 1987 text is Arkansas law. Alimony still deductible and includible. |
| Alabama §§ 40-18-14(a)(1), 40-18-15(a)(17) | Includes alimony “to the extent… includable… under 26 U.S.C. § 71”; deduction is “the same as… under 26 U.S.C. § 215” — with no date | Total. The referenced sections no longer exist, so the Alabama amounts follow the federal ones to zero. |
Both statutes point at the same two federal sections. Arkansas pinned its reference to a date and it survived. Alabama’s floats, so when Congress deleted those sections, Alabama’s rule emptied out with them. Four words — “in effect on January 1, 1987” — are the entire difference.
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.
What we could not establish
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, 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. 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.
Three 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. Virginia’s General Assembly replaced rolling conformity with a fixed date of 31 December 2025, announced 20 February 2026. Arizona’s tax policy desk gave 1 January 2026. All three dates fall years after the 2018 federal repeal, so all three 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.
What to actually do
If you are in Arkansas, California, New Jersey or New York: your state return does not follow the federal rule. Model any support figure on state and federal treatment separately, and if you are in California, find out which side of 1 January 2026 your instrument falls on.
If you are in Maine: ask your accountant one question — does this state require an adjustment for alimony paid or received? If you get a sourced answer, send it to us and we will publish it with the citation.
Everywhere else: the federal answer is the whole answer. That is worth knowing rather than assuming, which is the point of the table.
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.
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.