In the United States, the jock tax is the colloquially named income tax levied against visitors to a city or state who earn money in that jurisdiction. Since a state cannot afford to track the many individuals who do business on an itinerant basis, the ones targeted are usually very wealthy and high profile, namely professional athletes. Not only are the working schedules of famous sports players public, so are their salaries. The state can compute and collect the amount with very little investment of time and effort. History While "jock taxes" date to the 1960s, states started aggressively taxing the income of non-resident athletes in 1991, when California imposed the tax on the earnings of Chicago Bulls players who traveled to Los Angeles to play the Lakers in that year's NBA Finals. Illinois soon retaliated, imposing its own "jock tax" on out-of-state players—although Illinois' tax is only imposed on athletes from jurisdictions that impose jock taxes on Illinois-based players. Other states followed suit; by 2014, the only U.S. jurisdictions with major professional teams without a jock tax were Florida, Texas, Washington state, and Washington, D.C. (the three states do not impose personal income taxes, while the U.S. Congress specifically prohibits the District of Columbia from imposing its income tax on non-residents who work there). States are not the only U.S. jurisdictions that impose jock taxes—several cities impose their own jock taxes on top of those levied by their states. For example, since 2005, Pittsburgh has assessed what it calls the Non-Resident Sports Facility Usage Fee—a 3% tax on income derived from an individual's participation in any paid-admission event in a publicly funded venue, as long as the individual is not a city resident. In depth The following is an in-depth analysis of modern-day examples and criticisms of the jock tax. Examples Alex Rodriguez After the 2000 Major League Baseball season, Alex Rodriguez signed what was then the largest contract in American sports history, a ten-year contract worth $252 million, with the Texas Rangers. The tax collecting authorities of other states were notified alongside the public, and would separately demand that Rodriguez's employer withhold the tax due from his salary and remit it to each of them. Even though the state of Texas did not have an income tax, he still had to pay the various state income taxes applied to each away game in each location except for Florida,