Tax brackets 2026: federal income tax brackets and rates

What are the 2026 federal income tax brackets?

These brackets apply to income you earn during the 2026 calendar year, on the return you file in early 2027. They are the numbers that should be driving your withholding and your estimated tax payments right now. The figures come from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, which also folded in the changes made by the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act.

Every threshold below is taxable income, which is what is left after your standard deduction or itemized deductions come off. It is not your salary and it is not your gross income.

Two things are worth noticing. Married filing separately tracks the single brackets exactly until the 35% band, then its top rate kicks in at $384,350, far earlier than a single filer reaches it. And head of household gets meaningfully wider low brackets than single, which is why qualifying for that status is worth real money to a single parent.

What are the 2025 tax brackets?

These are the brackets that govern the return covering the 2025 tax year, filed in 2026. If you are reading this before you have filed, or you extended to October 15, 2026, this is your table.

The rates themselves did not move between 2025 and 2026, and under current law they are not scheduled to. What moves each year is where each band starts, adjusted for inflation. That is why a raise that only matches inflation usually leaves your tax picture roughly where it was.

How do tax brackets work?

Federal tax brackets are marginal. Each rate applies only to the slice of taxable income that falls inside that bracket, not to your whole income. Crossing into a higher bracket raises the rate on the dollars above the line and changes nothing about the dollars below it. Nobody has ever taken home less money by earning more.

This is the single most misunderstood thing in the US tax code, and it is worth working through one real example. Take a single filer with $70,000 of taxable income in 2026. That person is "in the 22% bracket," but here is what they actually pay:

Their top bracket is 22%. The share of their taxable income that actually goes to federal income tax is 14.4%. Those are two different numbers and confusing them leads people to turn down raises, decline bonuses and make bad decisions about a second job.

One practical consequence: a $1,000 deduction is worth $220 to this person, because it comes off the top, out of the 22% band. A deduction is always worth your marginal rate, never your effective rate, which is why knowing your top bracket matters when you are deciding whether an expense is worth tracking.

What is the standard deduction for 2025 and 2026?

Before any bracket touches your income, the standard deduction comes off. It is the reason someone earning $60,000 does not have $60,000 of taxable income. The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act made the higher post-2017 amounts permanent and raised them again, so both years below are larger than the old law would have produced.

There are two additions on top of those figures, and people miss both regularly.

The age and blindness addition. If you are 65 or older, or blind, you add an extra amount to your standard deduction for each condition that applies. For 2026 that extra amount is $1,650, rising to $2,050 if you are unmarried and not a surviving spouse. Someone single, 65 and blind adds it twice.

The enhanced deduction for seniors. Separately, for tax years 2025 through 2028, a taxpayer who reaches age 65 by the last day of the year can claim an additional $6,000 deduction, or $12,000 for a married couple where both spouses qualify. It phases out once modified adjusted gross income passes $75,000, or $150,000 on a joint return, and unusually it is available whether you itemize or not.

Itemizing only makes sense when your deductible expenses beat the standard deduction for your status. For most filers they do not come close, which is why roughly nine in ten returns take the standard amount. TaxFile totals both and applies whichever leaves you paying less.

How do I determine my tax bracket?

Your bracket is set by taxable income and filing status, in that order. Four steps get you there.

1. Add up your gross income. Wages from your W-2 box 1, net profit from any 1099 work after business expenses, interest, dividends, and unemployment if you received it.
2. Subtract your adjustments to reach adjusted gross income: deductible retirement contributions, health savings account contributions, student loan interest, and the deductible half of self-employment tax.
3. Subtract the standard deduction for your filing status, or your itemized total if it is larger. What is left is your taxable income.
4. Find that figure in the table for the right tax year and status. The band it lands in is your marginal bracket.

The step people skip is the third one, and skipping it is what puts them in the wrong bracket by a full band or more. A single filer earning $60,000 in salary in 2026 has taxable income near $43,900 after the $16,100 standard deduction, which places them in the 12% bracket, not the 22% bracket their salary alone would suggest.

Two other details change the answer. Pretax deductions from your paycheck, like a 401(k) contribution or health insurance premiums, are already excluded from W-2 box 1, so they have quietly lowered your bracket before you started. And if you are self-employed, the income tax brackets on this page are only half the bill: self-employment tax is a separate 15.3% on net profit, calculated before any of this.

What is the difference between your marginal and effective tax rate?

Your marginal rate is the rate on your next dollar of income. Your effective rate is your total federal income tax divided by your taxable income, which is what you genuinely paid. The marginal rate is always the higher of the two for anyone above the bottom bracket.

Which one you should be looking at depends entirely on the question you are asking.

A married couple with $150,000 of taxable income in 2026 sits in the 22% bracket with an effective rate close to 15%. If one of them takes on a side project, the profit gets taxed at 22% plus 15.3% self-employment tax, not at 15%. Pricing that work off the effective rate is how people end up short in April.

Do tax brackets change every year?

The rates rarely change, because changing them takes an act of Congress. The thresholds change every single year, because the tax code requires the IRS to adjust them for inflation and publish the new figures each fall in a revenue procedure.

The seven rates of 10% to 37% have been in place since the 2017 tax law, and the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act made them permanent rather than letting them lapse after 2025 as originally scheduled. So the practical answer for most people is that the rates you see here are the rates to plan around, and only the boundaries between them will drift.

That drift is not trivial. Between 2025 and 2026 the top of the single 12% bracket moved from $48,475 to $50,400. If your income sat just above the old line, roughly $1,900 of it moved from being taxed at 22% down to 12% without you doing anything.

State brackets are an entirely separate system on top of this one. Nine states levy no tax on wage income at all, some use a single flat rate, and the rest run their own graduated brackets with their own thresholds. Our state tax filing page covers how those interact with your federal return, and filing in more than one state covers what happens if you moved or worked across a state line.