Federal Income Tax Bracket Calculator

The U.S. federal income tax is progressive: each tax bracket's rate only applies to the income that falls within that bracket, not your entire income. That's why your marginal rate (the rate on your last dollar earned) is almost always higher than your effective rate (the rate on your total income), a distinction that trips up a lot of people.

This calculator uses the actual 2025 and 2026 IRS bracket thresholds and standard deduction amounts (reflecting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's changes) to show your total tax, your marginal and effective rates, and exactly how much of your income falls into each bracket.

Bracket thresholds shift with inflation each year, and your effective rate here is also the starting point for retirement and charitable giving planning, since both interact directly with how much of your income is taxable.

The bracket figures used here come straight from the IRS's own published rates, cross-checked against Tax Foundation's analysis of the same data.

How does this calculator work?

Enter your gross income, filing status (Single or Married Filing Jointly), and the tax year (2025 or 2026, each with its own IRS-published bracket thresholds and standard deduction).

Choose the standard deduction or enter your own itemized deduction total, whichever is larger for your situation. The calculator subtracts whichever figure you choose from gross income to get taxable income.

From there, it walks taxable income through the bracket table from the bottom up: the portion of taxable income that falls within the lowest bracket is taxed at that bracket's rate, the next portion (up to the next threshold) is taxed at the next rate, and so on, stopping once all of taxable income has been accounted for.

Each bracket's contribution is added together for total tax owed. Marginal rate is simply the rate of the last (highest) bracket reached; effective rate is total tax divided by gross income, always lower since the earlier, cheaper brackets pull the average down.

Worked example

$100,000 gross income, Single filer, 2025 tax year, using the standard deduction.

Standard deduction

$15,750

Taxable income

$84,250

Total tax

$13,449

Marginal rate

22%

Effective rate

13.45%

How the numbers work

After the $15,750 standard deduction, $84,250 is taxable. The first $11,925 is taxed at 10%, the next $36,550 at 12%, and the remaining $35,775 at 22%, the bracket the last dollar of income falls into.

Adding those three pieces gives $13,449 in total tax. Even though the marginal rate is 22%, the effective rate (total tax divided by gross income) is only 13.45%, since most of the income was taxed at the lower 10% and 12% rates first.

Moving into a higher tax bracket doesn't mean all your income gets taxed at the higher rate; only the income above that bracket's threshold does. This is why a raise that pushes you into a new bracket almost never results in less take-home pay overall, a common misconception.