@Priller
I'm going to add a complication that does not apply to you, as a clarification for other people who might read this.
You wrote:
"A state income tax refund is taxable in the year I receive it only if I claimed itemized deductions (and deducted state income taxes) in the prior year."
and
"if it is taxable (again, only if I itemized and claimed a deduction for state income tax in 2023)."
To be more precise, the refund is only taxable to the extent that you received a tax benefit for the deduction in the earlier year. There is a cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, often called the SALT cap. The cap applies to the total of real estate tax, personal property tax, and either state and local income tax or state and local sales tax. If your total state and local taxes exceeded the cap, then you did not receive the full benefit of itemizing your state income tax. In that case the state tax refund might only be partially taxable, or not taxable at all, even though you itemized and claimed a deduction for state income tax. The calculation gets complicated.
But as I said, this does not apply to you, @Priller, because you did not itemize deductions for 2023. You did not receive any tax benefit for the deduction, because there was no deduction. So your 2023 state tax refund is definitely not taxable at all. You do not have to enter it in your 2024 or 2025 tax return, and you do not have to do the complicated calculations.
