Income Tax Planner · 2026+

⚠ This tool is not guaranteed to be accurate. Use at your own risk.

What questions does this answer?

A · Marginal sensitivity: How does my total tax burden change as income shifts? Zoom in on your income range for fine-grained detail — the chart step size shrinks automatically. Cliffs, humps, and flat regions are all visible at a glance.
B · Sweet spots & danger zones: Where are the SS torpedo, IRMAA tier crossings, and NIIT threshold? The vertical reference lines and marginal rate curves (purple and yellow dashed) make them immediately visible.
C · True all-in effective rate: Federal + state + NIIT + the IRMAA you owe this year (enter your MAGI from two years earlier to include it), not just the marginal bracket. The white line on the Tax Rates view is the number that actually matters for planning.
D · What the tax is at a given income: Hover over your expected income on the chart. The info panel below shows every component — rates and dollars — simultaneously at that income level. Pin a column and Open in Tax Planner hands that income and the tax computed here to the Tax Payment Planner, which decides when to draw and when to pay it. This page computes the tax; that one schedules it.
E · Filing status changes: Switch the Filing Status control between MFJ and Single to see how marriage or becoming single shifts your brackets, standard deduction, IRMAA tiers, and effective rates — at every income level simultaneously.
F · State changes: Select a different state to instantly see how a move reshapes your all-in effective rate. States with no income tax, flat taxes, and progressive brackets all produce visibly different curves.
G · Aging and future-year projections: Increment your age to see how turning 65 (Medicare, IRMAA) or 73 (RMDs) affects the picture. Change the year to model the same income in the future — OBBBA senior deduction and SALT cap provisions sunset at different years, so you can see the tax landscape before and after those cliffs.

How the income sweep works

The chart sweeps ordinary income across the visible range, and the View is set in Fed income, the figure on the top axis (default $30k–$620k; the slider runs from -$300k up past $1.1M). Ordinary income covers wages, IRA/401k withdrawals, pensions, and RMDs — anything taxed at regular rates — and it can be negative: a business or rental loss offsets your other income, and taxable income cannot go below zero. Where ordinary income is $0, Fed income equals your Social Security plus gains; left of that you are seeing a net loss, or what a lower total would look like. Social Security and capital gains are entered as fixed amounts that apply at every point across the sweep, letting you see how they interact with the income ramp. The top x-axis shows the Fed income (ordinary + SS + CG gain) at each corresponding point.

The step size between data points and the x-axis label spacing both adapt automatically to the visible range — zoom into a narrower window and you get finer granularity with denser labels.

Income details

Open Income details in the left panel to spell out your ordinary income: wages or business income (negative for a loss), interest, non-qualified dividends, short-term capital gains (negative for a loss), IRA, 401k or pension withdrawals, and other income (negative for a loss). They add up to the ordinary income entered, which is the teal line on the chart and the income the info panel describes. The chart's ordinary-income axis is still the total, so these entries do not stack on top of it.
Qualified dividends are taxed with your capital gains and added to the gain from the sale. A short-term loss is netted against that gain first, and a net capital loss offsets only $3,000 of income a year; the rest carries forward and is ignored.
Interest and tax-exempt interest. Municipal bond interest is entered on its own row, not in Interest. It is not in your income tax, but it counts toward MAGI, so it moves the IRMAA tiers, and toward how much Social Security is taxed. Two rows are indented as of which: US Treasury, under Interest, is the part of Interest that is exempt from state tax, and your state taxes, under municipal bond interest, is the part your state taxes anyway (usually out-of-state bonds). An of which amount cannot exceed the row above it, and the page says so. For a fund, enter only the part its year-end statement attributes to US obligations or to your state.
Untaxed is money that came in without tax, such as a Roth withdrawal or cash from savings. It is part of Gross income and Net income so you see the whole picture, and it changes no tax, no IRMAA and no Social Security taxation.
Property and local taxes are real estate and local taxes only. State income tax is computed for you and added to them for the SALT deduction.
Social Security is one combined amount for everyone on the return, because how much of it is taxed depends on all of your income together.
Every entry is carried in the Share link, and a link that includes any of them opens the section.

Chart controls

Tax Rates / Tax Dollars — toggles the chart between rate lines (effective + marginal) and dollar-amount stacked bars.
Legend items — click any entry in the legend to toggle that line or bar series on/off. Useful for hiding distracting lines (e.g. IRMAA tiers you don't need).
Click a column — sets the ordinary income there. Other ordinary income is changed so the Income details add up to it, and the info panel shows the full breakdown at that income.
Explain — labels what moves the tax rate. A tinted band marks a stretch: the Social Security tax torpedo, the senior deduction phase-out, the SALT cap phase-out. A dotted line marks a step: where the federal or state bracket changes, where the capital-gains rate changes, where federal tax starts, and where the return switches between the standard deduction and itemizing.
Export — downloads a CSV file you can open in a spreadsheet. It holds the link that recreates this chart, a summary at the ordinary income shown (gross income from all sources, total taxes, net income), every setting you entered, and a table of every point on the chart with both the rates and the dollars.
Full button — resets the view to every Fed income from $0 up, whatever you have entered.
View slider (below the chart) — drag either handle to set the lower or upper bound of the visible total income directly, starting as low as -$300k. Both sliders normally start at $0; double-click the View label to set the View from $0 to $50k above your current Fed income, again to let both sliders reach negative values (the View and the pin do not change), and again to go back. Double-clicking Ordinary only switches the negative range on and off. A negative pin or View also opens the negative range by itself. The chart redraws and label spacing adapts immediately. The slider and the Full button stay in sync.
Ordinary slider and entry box (below the View slider) — show the ordinary income, the sum of the Income details, which can be negative. Moving the slider adds dollars to Other ordinary income (to the right) or removes them (to the left), so the details always add up to what the slider shows. If every detail is 0, only Other ordinary income changes; if you entered $20,000 of wages, the slider starts at $20,000. The slider scrubs across the visible range in chart steps and never re-zooms, so you can sweep it while watching the info panel. The entry box takes an exact dollar amount for fine tuning, and its readout is computed at that exact income even when it falls between two chart columns. Type an amount outside the current view and the chart re-centers on it.

The chart

Tax Rates view — federal effective (blue), state effective (orange), total effective (white), federal marginal on ordinary income + CG (purple dashed), and state marginal (yellow dashed).
Tax Dollars view — stacked bars for Federal Ordinary, Federal CG, Federal NIIT, IRMAA (the charge in force this year, in purple), State Ordinary, and State CG. The teal line (right axis) is your MAGI, the figure that decides your IRMAA two years out.
NIIT line (indigo dashed) — sits where MAGI crosses the NIIT threshold, which is left of the $250k ordinary-income mark whenever you have taxable Social Security or capital gains. It is always shown, whether or not you have a gain this year, because it is the MAGI level to stay under: once you are past it, any gain you do realize is surtaxed from the first dollar.
Info panel — hovering over the chart shows all rates and dollar amounts for that income level simultaneously, regardless of which view is active.
IRMAA tier lines — one dashed line per surcharge tier, drawn where MAGI reaches that tier and labeled with the threshold (for example T1 $241k). The thresholds are the ones that will apply two years from the selected year, inflated to that year. A tier outside the visible range is an arrow marker at the nearest edge. Click an entry in the IRMAA legend row under the chart to hide or show its line. The info panel gives the tier at a pinned income, its surcharge, the MAGI room before the next tier and what crossing it adds, all in purple because they are a future cost.
Top axis — shows Fed income (ordinary + SS + CG) at each major ordinary income mark. When SS and CG are zero it matches the bottom axis.

Share button

The Share button encodes all current settings into the URL and copies it to your clipboard. Paste it into any browser — or save it as a bookmark — to restore the exact same configuration. Works from a local file (file://) as well as a web server. A link can also be written by hand or built from a spreadsheet, and can ask for a result as a line of comma-separated numbers; the URL guide lists every parameter.

Simplifications

IRMAA lookback: Medicare charges IRMAA from your MAGI of two years prior. This year's charge comes from the MAGI you enter for that year; leave it blank and this year's taxes include no IRMAA. The IRMAA that this year's MAGI will cause two years out is shown separately in purple below Total Tax and is not added to this year's taxes. It assumes threshold inflation continues for those two years. Social Security and gains count toward MAGI, so they move these lines.
Medicare cost growth: Premiums and IRMAA surcharges follow the Medicare Trustees' projected path, about 6.6% a year through 2035 easing toward 3.8% long run. It is not adjustable and is unrelated to inflation. IRMAA income thresholds, by contrast, index with inflation.
OBBBA provisions (P.L. 119-21, signed July 4, 2025) are always applied; there is no switch, because they are current law. Each one turns itself off by tax year: the $6,000/person senior deduction applies through 2028 and phases out 6¢/$1 above $150k/$75k AGI; the $40,000 SALT cap phases down 30¢/$1 above $500k MAGI and reverts to $10k in 2030. All parameters are sourced from TAXData.OBBBA. The statute escalates both the SALT cap and its $500k phase-out threshold by 1%/yr from 2025 through 2029; this tool holds them at the 2025 amounts, so it understates the cap by about $400 in 2026 rising to roughly $1,600 by 2029.
SS provisional income thresholds ($32k/$44k MFJ, $25k/$34k Single) are intentionally not inflation-adjusted — that is current law, and the reason the SS torpedo worsens over time.
NIIT threshold ($250k MFJ / $200k Single) is also not inflation-indexed — another orphan in the tax code, unchanged since 2013. It is tested against MAGI, not ordinary income, so the chart's NIIT line is placed where the swept MAGI crosses it. The surtax applies to the lesser of net investment income and the amount by which MAGI exceeds the threshold; on this page net investment income is the capital gain only.
Excluded: AMT, self-employment tax, qualified dividends (modeled as CG), muni bond interest.