Update, September 26, 2026: The voters have had their say. James Fishback, the candidate behind the 50% OnlyFans tax, lost the Florida governor primary. Clearly people were not impressed with a platform that was big on sensational headlines and short on substance, and that is the end of that nonsense.
The tax had little to do with raising revenue and a lot to do with finding one more group of people to blame for the bad outcomes Americans are living with. Voters are getting clearer about where those problems really come from, and a punitive tax on creators working from their laptops would have fixed none of them. The numbers below still hold.
Set the politics aside for a moment, along with the "sin tax" label and whoever happens to be proposing it, and look at what a 50% tax on OnlyFans income would do to the person who actually pays it: the creator.
Once you work through the numbers, the argument is less about morality and more about arithmetic, and the arithmetic doesn't favor the proposal.
Start with something many people don't realize: a creator never sees 100% of what a fan pays. OnlyFans takes 20% off the top of everything, including subscriptions, tips and pay-per-view. A fan paying $100 means $80 reaches the creator before any tax is calculated.
Add a 50% state tax on top of federal tax, in a state that currently has no income tax at all, and you get one of the strangest tax outcomes in the country.
Florida has no income tax, except for this one job
Florida has no state income tax, and that is a big part of why people move there. A software developer, a day trader, a remote consultant and a retiree all keep their full income at the state level.
Under a 50% OnlyFans tax, a creator would go from paying no state tax to paying the highest state rate on any kind of income in America, purely because of the kind of work they do. They would have the same address, the same internet connection and the same laptop, and the rate would jump from zero to half on the basis of their job alone. A tax that targets a single occupation like this is hard to see as anything other than a penalty.
The take-home math, per $100 a fan spends
Here is what happens to $100 a fan pays a Florida creator today, and what would happen under the proposal.
Today (Florida, no state income tax):
- Fan pays $100
- OnlyFans keeps its 20% cut: -$20
- Creator's business income: $80
- Federal income tax + self-employment tax (illustrative, roughly a quarter of net for a working creator): -$22
- Creator keeps: ~$58
Under a 50% OnlyFans tax:
- Same $100, same $80 after the platform, same federal tax
- Florida then takes 50% of the OnlyFans income on top
- Creator keeps: under $30
Out of every $100 a Florida fan spends, the creator would take home less than a third, with the platform, the IRS and the state splitting the rest. (The federal figures are illustrative; your actual rate depends on income, deductions and filing status. The proposal also never says whether the 50% applies to gross or net income, which says something about how carefully it was put together. Our earnings studies have real figures you can use for your own bracket.)
Most of the people it hits aren't rich
The proposal is usually pitched as a tax on millionaires, but most creators earn nowhere near that.
- The average creator earns roughly $180 a month before fees. After OnlyFans' 20%, that's about $144. Halve that with a sin tax and a side income of a couple of hundred dollars a month shrinks to pocket change. The person paying it is usually running a side hustle.
- A mid-tier creator grossing $60,000 a year keeps somewhere around $34,000 today after the platform and federal taxes. Add the state's 50% and take-home pay falls toward $15,000 for the same amount of work.
- The high earners, who are supposedly the real target, are also among the most mobile workers in the economy, which matters more than any of the figures above.
Why Florida could end up collecting close to zero
Internet work is portable. An OnlyFans business needs a laptop and a place to live, and unlike a factory, a citrus grove, a port or a theme park, it can relocate in a weekend.
A creator who sees half their income about to disappear is unlikely to quit or retrain. The simplest response is to move to another state, and many would.
The policy doesn't need everyone to leave in order to fail. It only needs enough of the high earners, the very people it was designed to tax, to move. Florida would then collect nothing from them, because their income would belong to residents of Texas, Tennessee or Canada. The tax base would get smaller as the people in it left.
Florida would end up with less money
Supporters of the tax rarely account for this. When a mobile industry leaves, the state loses in three ways:
- It never collects the new tax, because the people it applies to have left.
- It loses their local spending. Most OnlyFans income comes from outside the state: subscribers in New York, California, Europe and elsewhere. Creators spend that money locally on rent, food, hotels, rides, hair, nails, gyms, photographers, editors and accountants. Each creator works a bit like a small export business, bringing outside money into Florida.
- It loses the taxes they already pay under the current rules, such as sales tax on everything they buy while living there.
The third loss is easy to miss. Florida already benefits from creators living there today, with no special policy at all. Driving them out would cost the state revenue it already collects.
"But it stops the sin"
Even on moral grounds, the policy wouldn't remove OnlyFans from Florida. Florida fans would keep subscribing, tipping and paying. Demand would stay in the state while the creators moved elsewhere. A payment that used to go from a Florida fan to a Florida creator, and was partly spent again in Florida, would instead leave the state entirely. People would keep doing the same things, and Florida would lose the money.
What a real revenue plan would include
A serious revenue proposal would spell out the dull details: a clear definition of "OnlyFans income," whether it covers other platforms and brand deals, how residency is decided for people who travel, how it would be enforced without endless audits, and how it would stop creators from simply restructuring or moving.
This proposal offered a big round number, a moral label and a promise to fund popular causes, which is good for headlines and weak as economic policy.
The lesson applies well beyond adult content. A business-friendly state is one with predictable rules. Once a state shows it is willing to invent a targeted, punitive tax to win applause, every mobile business has reason to worry, from remote developers and online sellers to AI startups that could just as easily operate from somewhere else.
Work through the take-home numbers and the conclusion is straightforward: the state would be counting on 50% of an income that disappears the moment creators change their address.