Income tax calculator for 2026

What this calculates, and what it does not

Three taxes come out of a salary and most calculators blur them together. Federal income tax runs through seven brackets after the standard deduction of $16,100 single or $32,200 joint. FICA is separate and flat — it starts at the first dollar and has no deduction at all, which is why low earners often pay more in FICA than in income tax. And then your state takes its own cut, or does not.

We show all three separately, and we show two effective rates rather than one: the rate on income tax alone, which is what compares to your marginal bracket, and the rate including FICA, which is what actually leaves your pay. Conflating those two is the most common error in this category.

What it does not do: itemised deductions, self-employment income, capital gains, or the city and county income taxes that eleven states allow. Those are named on the pages they affect instead of being silently omitted.

The same $85,000 salary, in all fifty-one places

Federal tax does not care where you live. On $85,000 single it takes $9,870, and FICA takes $6,503 more, in every state alike. What varies is the state layer, and it varies more than most people expect: from $0 to $6,604 on identical earnings.

9 states take nothing at all. At the other end, Oregon takes $6,604 — 7.77% of gross, or about $550 a month, which is a car payment. The median state takes $3,058. Between the extremes there is no cluster: the distribution is genuinely spread, which is why "average state income tax" is not a number worth quoting.

Two things make the gap smaller than it looks. The first is federal deductibility of state taxes, which is capped and only reaches itemisers. The second is that states without an income tax fund themselves some other way — usually property, sometimes sales, occasionally severance — so the comparison that matters is the total, not this line. Our property tax side covers the other half of it.

The comparison that does hold is between two states that both tax income. There the difference is real, it is annual, and it compounds: $3,546 a year between the dearest state and the median is $35,462 across a decade at this salary alone, before any raise.

A raise cannot leave you worse off, and here is the arithmetic

The commonest belief about income tax is that crossing into a higher bracket taxes all of your income at the higher rate. It does not. Brackets are slices: the 10.00% rate applies only to the first slice, the next rate only to the next slice, and so on. Only the dollars inside a bracket are taxed at that bracket's rate.

Run it. On $100,000 single, federal income tax is $13,170. On $105,000 it is $14,270 — $1,100 more tax on $5,000 more pay, which leaves $3,900 of the raise in hand. There is no income at which a dollar earned costs more than a dollar in federal tax.

That is also why your effective rate is always below your marginal rate. At $100,000 the marginal rate is 22.00% but the effective rate on income tax is 13.17%, because most of the income was taxed in the lower slices underneath. Quoting the bracket as "the tax I pay" overstates it by a wide margin at every income.

Where the belief comes from is real, though: benefit cliffs. Credits and subsidies that phase out over an income range can genuinely take more than a dollar per dollar earned — the ACA premium subsidy and several state credits behave this way. Tax brackets do not, and the two get conflated constantly.

The standard deduction is the first slice of all, at $16,100 single and $32,200 joint for 2026. Income below it is taxed at nothing, which is why the first bracket does not begin at the first dollar you earn.

Three systems, and why the ranking changes with your salary

The states divide into three groups: 9 tax no wage income at all, 13 apply a single flat rate, and 29 run graduated brackets. That split is the reason a "cheapest states for taxes" list is only ever true at the income it was computed for.

Watch what happens across the range. On $45,000 the dearest state takes $3,104; on $200,000 it takes $17,495 — but the state at the top of the list is not necessarily the same one, because a flat state that looks expensive to a modest earner looks cheap to a high one, and a graduated state does the reverse.

Hawaii runs 12 brackets, the most of any state. More brackets is not the same as higher tax — several heavily graduated states are cheap at ordinary salaries and only expensive at the top — which is exactly why the bracket count in a comparison table tells you nothing on its own.

The direction of travel is toward flat. Seven states have moved from graduated brackets to a single rate since 2021, usually with phased reductions written into the statute so the rate keeps falling on a schedule. That has a practical consequence for anyone reading a tax table: a rate that was correct last year is a coin flip this year, and several of those schedules step down mid-year rather than in January.

Where a flat state is genuinely flat matters too. Ohio and Mississippi both publish what looks like a single rate but tax nothing below a threshold, which makes them effectively two-bracket systems — and treating them as flat from the first dollar is how a widely used source came to overstate an Ohio bill by 43%.

FICA: the tax with no brackets and no deduction

Social Security and Medicare come out at a flat 7.65% of gross, from the first dollar. There is no standard deduction, no bracket to climb through and no filing status that changes it — which is why on $45,000 the FICA bill of $3,443 is larger than the federal income tax of $3,220 on the same salary.

It is also the reason "I'm in the 22% bracket" describes very little of what actually leaves a pay packet. Add 7.65% to the marginal bracket and you have the real cost of the next dollar earned, before the state takes its share.

Social Security stops. Above $184,500 of wages in 2026 the 6.20% component ends for the year, so a high earner's marginal rate falls partway through the year even though nothing about their bracket changed. Medicare does not stop, and adds 0.90% above $200,000.

The single most expensive misunderstanding in this category follows directly: boxes 4 and 6 of a W-2 are FICA, not withheld income tax, and they never come back as a refund. Adding them to boxes 2 and 17 when estimating a refund overstates it by thousands, every time.

Self-employment doubles it. An employee pays 7.65% and the employer matches it invisibly; someone self-employed pays both halves as self-employment tax. It is the largest single difference between a salary and the same money invoiced, and it is not modelled by the calculator on this page.

The city and county income taxes almost nobody models

Eleven states let a city, county or school district levy its own income tax on top of the state's. It is the layer that national calculators omit, and the omission is not small: in several of these places the local tax exceeds what the state itself takes from a modest salary.

We have loaded 3,672 of them across 7 states — 2,627 Pennsylvania municipalities, 892 Ohio municipalities and school districts, 92 Indiana counties, 24 Maryland counties and Baltimore City, 24 Michigan cities, and New York City's own brackets — each read off the state's own published rate file rather than a summary of it.

The mechanics differ enough that a single rate field cannot express them. Pennsylvania and Ohio tax earned income; Maryland taxes state taxable income, so its deduction flows through; Indiana taxes at the county of residence on 1 January; Michigan taxes non-residents at exactly half the resident rate in all 24 of its cities; Portland's Metro and Multnomah levies only start above a threshold, so a salary below it pays nothing at all despite the city having the taxes.

Two traps this creates. Withholding tables are not rate schedules — New York City's withholding runs 2.05% to 4.25% because it folds in a school tax credit, while the statutory brackets are 3.078% to 3.876%, and publishing the first as the second is a common error we nearly made ourselves. And names repeat: "Washington Township" exists in twenty-two Pennsylvania counties at six different rates, so a lookup by name alone returns the wrong tax most of the time.

Does moving state actually pay?

At $120,000 the state income tax gap between Oregon and a state that levies none is $9,666 a year. That is the number people move for, and it is real — but it is also gross, and three things reduce it before it reaches a bank account.

Property tax is the first. States without an income tax raise the money elsewhere, and property is the usual place: several no-income-tax states sit well above the national median county rate of 0.84%. On a $500,000 house, a rate one percentage point higher costs $5,000 a year and cancels most of the saving on its own.

Housing cost is the second and is usually larger than either tax. Sales tax is the third: unavoidable, invisible, and heavier on households that spend most of what they earn — which reverses the ranking entirely at modest incomes.

And residency has to be real. Leaving a state does not end its claim on income earned there, and several states apply day-count and domicile tests aggressively to people who keep a house, a licence or a business behind. Working across a state line means the state where the work happens generally taxes it, whatever your address says.

The honest way to run the comparison is total tax on your actual income against total tax on your actual housing, in both places, including local income tax where it exists. Every state page here gives the first half and every county page the second.

Five ways an income tax estimate goes wrong

Quoting the bracket as the tax. On $85,000 single the marginal rate is 22.00% but federal income tax is $9,870, an effective 11.61%. Brackets are slices; only the dollars inside one are taxed at its rate, and the bracket overstates the bill at every income.

Comparing an effective rate against a marginal rate. They measure different things — one is the average across everything you earned, the other the cost of the next dollar — and a total effective rate that includes FICA and state tax will routinely exceed a federal marginal rate without anything being wrong.

Leaving out FICA. 7.65% from the first dollar, no deduction, no brackets: $6,503 on this salary. At modest incomes it exceeds federal income tax, and a take-home figure computed without it is not a take-home figure.

Leaving out the local layer. Eleven states let a city or county tax income and 3,672 such jurisdictions are loaded here. In several of them the local tax exceeds what the state takes from a modest salary, and almost no national calculator includes any of it.

Using a table that is out of date. Rates, thresholds and credits move every January and several states enact mid-year with retroactive effect. Of 37 states checked against their own department of revenue, 12 carried a wrong figure in the compiled sources — which is why every figure here shows the date it was verified.

What checking every state against its own source turned up

Every state's figures here were read off the state's own department of revenue publication, one state at a time. Of the 37 reviewed so far, 21 matched the compiled sources everyone uses and 12 did not. That is not a rounding-error failure rate, and it is the reason this site publishes a verification log at all.

The errors were not random. Ohio's bill was overstated by 43% because the source treated a flat rate as flat from the first dollar, ignoring the exempt band. South Carolina and Georgia had rates superseded by legislation passed after the source was compiled — Georgia's cut was backdated to 1 January, so a table published in April was correct when written and wrong by summer. California was shown as fully taxing military retirement, which AB 53 stopped. Oregon's earned income credit was published at 17% when the statute says 9%.

A pattern runs through them: compiled sources are accurate about structure and unreliable about timing. Brackets and mechanics rarely change; rates, thresholds and credits change constantly, and mid-year enactments with retroactive effect are the single commonest cause of a figure being wrong.

So each page carries the date the figure was verified and the document it came from, and states plainly when a figure has not yet been checked against a primary source. "We have not looked" and "it does not exist" are different claims, and conflating them is how a calculator tells someone confidently that a relief they qualify for is not available.

Questions

How much income tax will I pay in 2026?

It depends on three things: your gross pay, your filing status, and the state you live in. Federal tax alone runs from 10% to 37% across seven brackets, with the first $16,100 untaxed for a single filer. On top of that, forty-two states levy their own income tax and nine do not. The calculator on this page works out all of it, bracket by bracket.

Is this an estimate or the real figure?

It is an estimate for planning, and an exact one for the case it models: a salaried worker taking the standard deduction. It applies the 2026 federal brackets, FICA, and your state's own rates. What it does not model is itemised deductions, self-employment income, capital gains or local city taxes — and it says so on each page rather than quietly leaving them out.

Which states have no income tax?

Nine: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming. Note what that does not mean — every one of them raises the money another way, usually through property or sales tax, and several have property rates well above the national median.

Why do your figures differ from another calculator?

Usually because one of us is out of date, and often it is not us. We check every state against its own department of revenue and publish the log: 12 of the states we have checked carried a wrong figure in the compiled sources everyone uses. Ohio was overstated by 43% because the source omitted its exempt band. Each state page shows what we verified, when, and against which document.

Do you cover county and city income taxes?

Yes. Eleven states let a city, county or school district levy its own income tax, and we have loaded 3,672 jurisdictions across 7 of them — every Pennsylvania municipality, every Ohio municipality and school district, all 92 Indiana counties, Maryland's counties and Baltimore City, Michigan's cities, and New York City's own brackets. Each came off the state's published rate file rather than a summary, and each page names the document and the date it was checked.