Enter your gross income and filing status to calculate taxable income, total tax owed, and your effective and marginal tax rates.
How to Use the Income Tax Calculator
Pick Single or Married Filing Jointly with the toggle, then enter gross income. The standard deduction for whichever status you picked comes off automatically, and taxable income, total tax, effective rate, and marginal rate all follow from there.
Taxable Income = Gross Income − Standard DeductionWhy Isn't Your Whole Income Taxed at Your Top Rate?
This is probably the single most misunderstood number in personal finance. Landing in the 22% bracket doesn't mean 22% of your entire income goes to tax — it means only the slice of income that falls inside that bracket is taxed at 22%. Everything below it was already taxed at 10% and 12% on the way up. A single filer with $58,900 of taxable income in 2026 pays 10% on the first $12,400, 12% on the next $38,000, and 22% only on the remaining $8,500 — not 22% on the full $58,900.
That's the gap between the two rates this calculator reports side by side. Marginal rate is the rate on your last dollar earned — useful for deciding whether an extra hour of overtime or a raise is worth it, since that's the rate the new income actually gets taxed at. Effective rate is total tax divided by gross income — the real, blended share of everything you made that went to federal tax. The marginal rate is always higher, sometimes by a wide margin, and effective rate is the one that actually describes your overall tax burden.
Only the Standard Deduction Is Modeled
Roughly nine in ten filers take the standard deduction rather than itemizing, so it's the reasonable default here — $16,100 for single filers and $32,200 for joint filers in 2026. If you itemize (mortgage interest, large charitable gifts, state and local taxes up to the cap), your actual taxable income will be lower than what this tool shows, and so will your tax bill.