No city income tax in Mount Pleasant

East Lansing started taxing income on January 1, 2019 — 1% for residents, 0.5% for anyone commuting in — and became the twenty-fourth Michigan city with a local income tax. Mid-Michigan’s other big college town never joined. Mount Pleasant, home of Central Michigan University, taxes nobody’s wages: no resident rate, no commuter rate, nothing withheld for the city.

Otherwise the two towns rhyme — campus, college bars, football Saturdays — and people sometimes assume the tax picture matches too. It doesn’t. In Mount Pleasant the local bill arrives as property tax, with mills split among the city, Isabella County, and the schools, and that’s the number worth studying on a house listing. A paycheck from CMU, from McLaren Central Michigan, or from the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe’s Soaring Eagle operations carries no city deduction at all.

The nearest paycheck that does get clipped belongs to anyone driving to Saginaw, about 45 minutes east, where nonresidents pay 0.75% on what they earn inside the city. Work where you live in Mount Pleasant and the city income-tax line on your return stays blank.