Tax Bracket Calculator

Your marginal tax rate (Marginal Tax Rate) is the rate charged on your last dollar of taxable income -- the top bracket your income reaches. Effective Tax Rate instead divides total federal tax by your whole taxable income, so it blends every lower bracket that taxed earlier dollars at a lower rate. Because computeFederalTax sums tax bracket by bracket rather than applying the top rate to everything, effective rate is always at or below the marginal rate.

Yes. Filing status selects an entirely different bracket table via getFederalBrackets(status) -- married filing jointly brackets are roughly double the width of single brackets at the lower rates, and head of household sits between the two. The same taxable income can therefore land in a different marginal bracket and owe a different total tax purely because of which status is selected, with taxable income held fixed.

marginalFederalRate only changes when your income crosses into the next bracket boundary (line 33-38 of tax-calc.ts steps through brackets in order and stops at the one your income sits in). At the default $85,000 for a single filer, that income sits well inside the 50,400-105,700 bracket, so a moderate raise or cut leaves the marginal rate unchanged -- switching filing status, which swaps the whole bracket table, moves it far more at that same income level.

This calculator only applies the 2026 federal ordinary-income brackets to the taxable income you enter. It does not add state income tax, Social Security or Medicare (FICA) payroll tax, the Net Investment Income Tax, or apply any deductions, credits, or preferential capital-gains rates -- "taxable income" is assumed to already be net of deductions when you enter it.