New Mexico‘s tax system ranks 31st overall on the 2025 State Tax Competitiveness Index. New Mexico has a graduated state individual income tax with a top rate of 5.9 percent. Unusually, New Mexico’s corporate tax rate is also graduated, with rates ranging from 4.8 percent to 5.9 percent, and not indexed for inflation.
New Mexico also has a 4.875 percent tax on sales, with an average combined state and local rate of 7.62 percent. As a hybrid between an ordinary sales tax and a gross receipts tax, this tax does not apply to all intermediate transactions like a pure gross receipts tax but does apply to many more business inputs than are included in a typical sales tax, including manufacturing machinery and research and development (R&D) equipment. When this gross receipts-like tax applies to business-to-business transactions, it causes tax pyramiding throughout the supply chain, hampers investment, and negatively affects low-margin businesses.
The state’s corporate income tax also features a throwback rule, which exposes in-state businesses to additional tax when they sell into other states with which they do not have nexus, discouraging some businesses from locating operations in New Mexico. The state conforms to the federal treatment of capital investment under its corporate income tax, but with federal full expensing provisions currently phasing out, New Mexico has an opportunity to make its first-year expensing provisions permanent to avoid the erosion of this pro-investment provision.
The State Tax Competitiveness Index enables policymakers, taxpayers, and business leaders to gauge how their states’ tax systems compare. While there are many ways to show how much state governments collect in taxes, the Index evaluates how well states structure their tax systems and provides a road map for improvement.
States that tax GILTI increase filing complexity, drive up the cost of tax compliance, and introduce unnecessary economic uncertainty and legal risk. 21 states and DC continue to tax GILTI despite these challenges.
Sports stadium subsidies are salient political gimmicks designed to appear as if politicians are providing tangible benefits to taxpayers. The empirical evidence shows repeatedly that stadium subsidies fail to generate new tax revenue and new jobs or attract new businesses.