Taxable income is the starting point
Taxable income is gross income minus pre-tax payroll items, then minus the standard deduction or itemized deductions - whichever is larger. It is the number the brackets are actually applied to, so it is the number this calculator asks for, not the salary on the offer letter.
If you prefer to start from gross income, the income tax calculator on this site walks from salary to taxable income and on to take-home pay in one pass. Entering gross income on this page instead produces an inflated bill, because the deduction step is skipped and the money payroll already took out - 401(k) contributions, HSA deposits, the employee share of premiums - never reaches a bracket at all.
Each band is taxed on its own slice
The table lists every bracket, the dollars of your income that land in each, the tax on that slice and the running total. Only the income inside a band is charged at that band rate, so the dollars below the top band keep the lower rates and nothing is charged twice.
The next-bracket threshold printed on the hero is where your marginal rate steps up - the line at which a further dollar moves into the band above. When taxable income lands exactly on that line, the next dollar is the first one charged at the higher rate, and the threshold is reported as that same figure rather than as a rung you have already climbed.
The marginal rate decides what a raise costs
A raise is taxed at the marginal rate, the same rate as your last current dollar. The raise table shows the new total tax, the extra tax and the new marginal rate, so a pay bump can never make your take-home pay fall: the dollars earned before it keep the rate they were already charged at.
The shorthand people repeat - a $1,000 raise costing $1,000 times the bracket - is wrong, because only the new dollars are charged at the marginal rate. The sentence under the table quotes the actual extra tax on the first $1,000, not a rounded multiple of the whole income, so it can be checked against the table line by line.
The numbers are the inflation-adjusted 2026 figures
The brackets and the next-bracket thresholds come from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, the published 2026 inflation adjustments, and the standard deduction note cites IRS Publication 17. Both documents are verified against the official texts and kept on record.
This page covers the ordinary-income federal brackets only; long-term capital gains have their own 0%, 15% and 20% ladder, and payroll taxes are a separate question covered by the income tax calculator. Above the top band there is no next threshold to cross, so the hero says so instead of inventing one, and a taxable income of zero returns a prompt to enter a figure rather than a table of zeros.
A bonus is withheld at 22%, whatever the bracket says
The bracket table decides the tax you owe; the withholding tables decide what is taken out during the year, and the two are not the same calculation. Supplemental wages - bonuses, commissions, severance and the taxable part of many awards - are withheld at a flat 22% federal rate unless the employer elects to aggregate them with regular wages.
For anyone in the 24% bracket or above, that flat rate under-withholds and the shortfall surfaces in April. For anyone in the 12% bracket it over-withholds and produces a refund. Neither outcome changes the tax on the bonus itself, which is the marginal rate in the table above; only the timing of the payment changes.
The same logic explains why a raise, a second job or a spouse starting work can leave a household short at filing: each payer withholds as though it were the only one. The fix is step 2 of Form W-4 or a quarterly estimate, not a different bracket calculation.
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