Money, Checked · the arithmetic, shown

Your three tax rates

Your bracket, the rate your next dollar actually costs, and the rate you really pay are three different numbers. Almost every argument about tax is two people using two of them. Put your salary in and watch all three.

2026 tax yearfederal + payroll IRS & SSA figuresnot advice

Your situation

Everything recalculates as you drag.

Optional

A flat rate, applied to wages less your deferral. Real state systems have their own brackets — this is your input, not a claim about any state.

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Your bracket
The rate printed in the table your top dollar reaches. It is a label, not a bill.
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Your next dollar
What a raise, a bonus or an hour of overtime actually costs. The only one that answers a decision.
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What you actually pay
Total tax divided by salary. This is history — it tells you what happened, not what to do.
The bill

Where it goes

The brackets

A bracket is a slice, not a category

Nobody is in a bracket. Your income passes through each one, and every dollar in a slice is taxed at that slice's rate — the same for everybody. The filled part is how much of each bracket your income actually occupies.

occupied by your income the rest of the bracket
The raise test

Can a raise leave you worse off?

The single most common belief about tax brackets. Drag your salary anywhere and it stays false — here is what a raise actually does from where you are.

The part nobody mentions

Your marginal rate does not only go up

Social Security tax stops at a wage base. Above it, 6.2% simply is not charged — so the rate on your next dollar falls, then ticks back up when the Additional Medicare Tax starts. The dot is you.

Method, sources and what this does not do

This is the same model the video runs on, ported to the page. It is checked against a separate Python implementation on every commit, and the page itself is checked against the model — if the two ever disagree, the build fails.

Sources. Brackets and the standard deduction are the IRS tax-year 2026 inflation adjustments. The Social Security wage base is the SSA contribution and benefit base for 2026. Rates are IRC 3101(a) and 3101(b); the Additional Medicare Tax threshold was fixed in statute in 2013 and has never been indexed, which is why it reaches further every year.

What this does not include.

  • credits of any kind — no child tax credit, no earned income credit, no education or saver's credit
  • itemised deductions; it assumes the standard deduction
  • Section 125 cafeteria-plan premiums, which do reduce the payroll-tax base
  • the OBBBA tips, overtime and car-loan-interest deductions, which attach to particular kinds of income rather than to salary generally
  • the employer half of payroll tax — the same again. Most economists think it comes out of your wages; this model takes no position, it simply does not count it
  • state systems as anything but a flat rate you type in

Every one of those omissions pushes the computed tax up relative to somebody's real bill, and none of them push it down. So treat these rates as a ceiling.

Next

The decision this actually changes

When you put money into a traditional 401(k) you save tax at your marginal rate — the middle number above. When you take it out in retirement you pay your average rate, because the standard deduction and the bottom brackets refill every year. The whole Roth-versus-traditional argument is a bet on the gap between two numbers most people think are the same. Run that one too →