This is an excellent and interesting question that even has a bit of historical significance.
Nevada has had extremely user-friendly residency requirements since it became a state in 1864. At that time, Nevada was desperate for residents, so if you pitched a tent or filed a mining claim, for all practical purposes, you qualified for residency. The legal residency requirement, however, was six months; even that long a period was among the shortest in the nation.
This became an issue in the early 1900s, when a clever New York attorney recognized that Nevada's brief residency requirement lent itself to the facilitation of divorces -- in an age when it took two, five, or even ten years to "qualify" for a divorce in many states; some states, in fact, outlawed divorce altogether.
Though its liberal residency requirement hadn't changed for 50 years, Nevada, Reno in particular, was "discovered" as a divorce destination around 1906. It didn't take long for the rich, the famous, and the desperate to start flocking to the Reno "clinic" to take the marriage "cure"; throughout the nation, newspaper society and gossip pages covered these illustrious divorcees, rendering Reno a household name. Millionaires, movie stars, socialites, artists, politicians and other public figures constituted a divorce "colony" as they waited out their six-month residency requirement, at the end of which they were granted an automatic divorce as "Nevadans."
(As an aside, this was a high time in Reno. The daily train became known as the Divorcee Special, the county courthouse as the Separator. In the early 1920s, the mayor himself, a lawyer, set a record for the number of clients granted divorce decrees in one day. The political and financial power brokers all moved to Reno from the waning mining towns around the state. To cap it off, a national exposition celebrating the completion of the transcontinental Victory and Lincoln highways -- now Interstate 80 and US 50, respectively -- was held in Reno, prompting the exultant residents to install an arch at the entrance to downtown with the proud slogan, "Biggest Little City in the World.")
In 1927, the residency requirement was reduced to three months. Then, in 1931, it was reduced again to a scandalous six weeks. Now, anyone and everyone could afford a glamorous Reno divorce. That year, nearly 5,000 divorces were granted in Reno, roughly 20 every working day of the --
But back to the point.
The Nevada residency requirement for divorce today is still six weeks, as it's been for more than 70 years. The residency requirements for other purposes vary: none at all to apply for a marriage license; 30 days to register to vote (and to be required to obtain registration for a motor vehicle); six months for an in-state hunting or fishing license and prior to the granting of an adoption petition; one year to qualify for in-state tuition at a college or university; two years to run for political office; and so on.
Finally, to answer your question about taxes, here’s what the Nevada Revised Statutes say.
Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) 10.155 provides that "unless otherwise required by a specific statute, the legal residence of a person in Nevada is that place where he has been physically present within the state during the period for which residency is claimed. Legal residence starts on the day that such actual physical presence begins."
So it looks to us like the minute you make Nevada your legal residence (by actually physically domiciling yourself here, which could mean anything from sleeping on the floor of your sister's dorm room to relocating to a 10,000-square-foot mansion in Lake Las Vegas), you’re a resident.
NRS 10.155 further states that "if a person leaves the jurisdiction of his residence with the intention, in good faith, of returning without delay and continuing his residence, the time of absence is not considered in determining the fact of residence."
However, if
