Marginal Tax Rate Calculator

Marginal rate is just the rate on your bracket's top slice of income — whichever bracket your taxable income currently sits in. Effective rate is your total federal tax owed divided by your gross income, averaged across every dollar you earned. Because progressive brackets tax lower income slices at lower rates first, only the income above each threshold gets taxed at that threshold's rate, so the blended average is always lower than the top marginal bracket.

It computes taxable income using whichever is larger: your entered itemized deductions or the current statutory standard deduction for your filing status, both pulled from the site's shared reference-data module. This mirrors the real tax code, where you always itemize only if doing so beats simply taking the standard deduction — entering $0 in itemized deductions just falls back to the standard deduction automatically.

It re-runs the full progressive federal tax calculation with your taxable income increased by that amount, then subtracts your original federal tax to isolate exactly what you'd owe on that specific increment. Because progressive brackets have thresholds, a large enough additional-income amount can span two brackets, so the marginal rate shown on this increment may differ from your baseline marginal rate if the raise pushes part of it into a higher bracket.

No — it only models federal income tax through the actual progressive bracket structure, plus a flat-percentage approximation of state income tax based on the rate you enter. It does not add FICA payroll taxes, and the state tax figure is a simplification since real state tax codes have their own bracket structures that vary widely and aren't modeled here individually.