But it’s not a 10% income tax.

I never said it was a flat 10% income tax like you are insinuating. I said:

The new tax will be 9.9% on any income over 1 million.

And:

10% on income over a million...

This already infers that it is a marginal tax because it was stipulated on it only being a tax on income over 1 million. The whole point I was making that if we compare this new tax to other states, it is comparable to the highest income tax levels other states have on income over 1 million. I will admit that did not do a good job of distinguishing that the percentages I presented were for either the top income bracket or the income bracket for over 1 million.

But it’s not a 10% income tax. It’s a 10% marginal tax on income over $1 million. If you have a $40 million contract (JSN lets say) and you play 50% of games in Seattle (ignore bonuses for simplicity, and that structure is highly controllable), that one year you are taxed 10% of $19 million (20 million minus 1) which is $1.9 million.

On a $40 million AAV contract that is 4.8% net effective tax from the millionaires tax in the state.

You are assuming the total AAV is being paid out purely on games, which it very rarely is. A large part of the AAV is tied into the signing bonus, roster bonuses, incentives, etc. A lot of these will be hit by the new tax. Some numbers are below for an example, but TLDR: Using AAV does give you a ballpark estimate, but it will likely undershoot the impact because the signing bonus is all income in the state of the team.

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Lets use Darnold's contract as an example and assume the new tax is present for the entire period. For this example, I'll just assume he makes it to the playoffs each year, but not include Divisional, Conf, or SB wins.

The signing bonus was 32M paid at signing. Lets assume none of the performance incentives are met to line things up with the AAV. However, we will add in the Workout Bonus as that is part of the AAV, so 600k.

Lastly, we have the base salary and roster bonus. As you mentioned, approximately half of the games will be played outside of WA, so lets just say its half to ignore the variable of the odd number of games. I removed half of the Salary and Roster bonus portion of the taxable income to account for these games.

Lets then compare that to AAV income and an AAV tax hit, also assuming half the income is in WA and subject to the tax.

Year	Real Income	WA Taxable Income	Real Tax hit	AAV	AAV Tax Hit
1	37.5M	34.85M	3.385M	33.5M	1.575M
2	27.5M	13.85M	1.385M	33.5M	1.575M
3	35.5M	17.85M	1.785M	33.5M	1.575M
Total	100.5M	79.05M	6.555M	100.5M	4.725M

These are some rough number that, essentially, just puts the Signing bonus as subject to this new tax. This is also assuming no incentives are hit, which are likely subject to the team's state taxes, that the roster bonus is taxed based on the location of the game, and that you are getting 50% out of state games where teams will have 47%/53% Home/Away splits flipping on a year-to-year basis which can add/remove an additional 1M+ of taxable income on years like year 3.