For Americans closing in on 65, the big question has shifted. It used to be about timing: when to stop working, when to claim retirement benefits, when to finally let go. Now the question that keeps people up at night is geographic. Where you land in retirement can quietly determine whether your savings last or quietly bleed out through taxes, premiums, and the creeping cost of simply getting older somewhere expensive.
Three independent studies (from WalletHub, CareScout, and The Motley Fool) released between late 2025 and this past February approached the problem from different angles and still kept circling back to the same three retirement-friendly states.
Not because those places are beautiful or warm or particularly easy to sell to a skeptic. But because when you run the numbers on what retirement actually costs day to day, year to year, they keep coming out ahead.
Three States, One Goal: Retiring Without Going Broke
Wyoming doesn’t make most people’s shortlists. It’s cold in ways that feel personal, sparsely populated, and its economy has spent generations leaning on coal and cattle. But strip away the postcard expectations and look at what a fixed income actually buys there, and the picture changes fast.
The state takes nothing in income tax, nothing on estates, nothing on inheritance. In-home care — the kind most people need eventually, whether they plan for it or not — ranks among the five cheapest in the country.
Wyoming’s Yeses and Noes for Retirement
Violent crime is low. Elder poverty is low. The average Social Security recipient there pulls in around $28,000 a year, and that money goes noticeably further than it would in California or New York or even parts of the Midwest.
The honest drawback is medical infrastructure. Specialized care is harder to reach, and for someone managing serious chronic illness, that gap is real and worth weighing seriously. But for a retiree in reasonable health who wants to make their savings last without feeling like they’re sacrificing everything to do it, Wyoming is harder to argue against than most people expect.
Florida as a Haven for Retirees
Florida’s case doesn’t need to be built from scratch; the reputation is already there, and for once the data backs it up rather than complicating it. No state income tax, no estate tax, no inheritance tax. Those three absences alone move the needle for retirees living off Social Security and investment income.
Beyond the tax picture, Florida receives some of the highest per-senior federal allocations in the country under the Older Americans Act, which funds the kind of support infrastructure that matters quietly and consistently: subsidized rides to medical appointments, meal delivery programs, in-home assistance for those who need a little help staying independent.
Florida Still Delivers for Retirees
The network of retirement communities, geriatric specialists, and senior-focused services is thicker here than almost anywhere else in the country. The tradeoff is cost of living, particularly along the coasts, where housing and insurance have climbed steeply. But for retirees who do their homework on location within the state, the combination of tax relief and service availability is genuinely difficult to replicate elsewhere.
South Dakota Won’t Wow You: But You’ve Gotta Consider It Anyway
South Dakota rarely comes up in retirement conversations, which is part of what makes it worth taking seriously. It levies no income tax and no inheritance or estate tax. Its senior poverty rate sits near the bottom of national rankings.
The share of older residents dealing with food insecurity is almost negligible by comparison to the national figure; a detail that sounds small until you consider what it signals about the broader affordability of daily life there.
The Quiet Case for South Dakota Retirement
What South Dakota doesn’t offer is atmosphere in the conventional sense. No ocean, no mountains worth bragging about, no major-city energy. What it offers instead is a kind of financial steadiness that’s genuinely rare: a place where a retiree on a fixed income can build a realistic monthly budget and actually stick to it. That’s not exciting to read about. But it shows up, month after month, in bank balances that don’t shrink as fast as they do in more appealing-sounding places.
Where You Retire Is a Budget Decision
The broader backdrop matters here. In 2025, roughly one in three retirees trimmed spending on groceries or prescription drugs just to avoid going negative before the month ended. The average Social Security check in 2026 runs about $2,071 a month; a figure that sounds reasonable in the abstract and gets eaten alive in practice by housing, healthcare, and utilities in high-cost states.
For nearly half of American seniors, that benefit accounts for more than half of everything coming in. That’s the financial reality these decisions get made against, and it’s why state selection has stopped being a preference and started being a planning variable with real consequences.
Rankings like these are a starting point, not a verdict. How far you want to live from your kids, whether your current doctor is worth relocating away from, how much gray sky you can tolerate in January — none of that shows up in a WalletHub index, and none of it is trivial. But if the goal is to find solid footing before making that call, the evidence in 2026 points consistently toward the same three places.
Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re honest, and in retirement planning, honest tends to age better than optimistic.
