2026 federal tax brackets and rates

What are the 2026 federal tax brackets?

The 2026 federal tax brackets are the income ranges that set your marginal tax rate: 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37%. Congress made these seven rates permanent (they were previously set to expire after 2025) in the tax law passed in July 2025, commonly called the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Each year the IRS resets the dollar thresholds for inflation, so the rates stay the same but the income ranges they apply to move up. For 2026, the thresholds rose across the board compared with 2025.

Your filing status, single, married filing jointly, married filing separately, or head of household, sets which set of thresholds applies to you. A single filer and a head of household with the same income can owe different amounts because their bracket cutoffs differ.

The 2026 tax bracket table (all filing statuses)

The table below is the full set of 2026 income thresholds for every bracket and every filing status, taken directly from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32. Each row shows the taxable income range taxed at that rate.

Source: IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, Section 4.01, Tables 1 through 4 (tax year 2026).

Notice that the married filing separately column matches the single column for every bracket except the top one. The 37% bracket starts much lower for separate filers ($384,350) than for single filers ($640,600), which is one of the reasons married couples rarely benefit from filing separately on federal taxes alone.

Are you taxed at your top bracket rate on all your income?

No. This is the single most common misunderstanding about tax brackets, and it is worth stating plainly: your tax bracket is not your tax rate on your entire income. The federal system is marginal, which means each bracket only taxes the slice of income that falls inside it. Moving into a higher bracket only raises the rate on the income above that bracket's starting point. It does not raise the rate retroactively on the dollars you already earned in the lower brackets.

So if you are single with $60,000 in taxable income in 2026, you are "in" the 22% bracket because your income crosses the $50,400 threshold. But you do not pay 22% on all $60,000. You pay 10% on the first $12,400, 12% on the next chunk up to $50,400, and 22% only on the $9,600 that sits above $50,400. Getting a raise that pushes a few dollars into a higher bracket never shrinks your take-home pay. It only means those specific extra dollars are taxed at the higher rate.

Worked example: tax on $60,000 of taxable income (single filer, 2026)

Here is the math in full, using the 2026 single-filer table above.

Total tax owed is $7,912, which works out to an effective (average) tax rate of about 13.2%, not the 22% top bracket. That gap, 22% marginal versus 13.2% effective, is exactly what the "marginal" system means in practice. This example ignores credits and assumes the $60,000 is already taxable income, meaning your deductions have already been subtracted.

What is the 2026 standard deduction?

Before you apply the brackets above, most filers subtract the standard deduction from their gross income to get taxable income. For 2026 the standard deduction is $16,100 for single filers, $32,200 for married filing jointly, $16,100 for married filing separately, and $24,150 for head of household. So a single filer with $76,100 in gross income and no other adjustments would have $60,000 in taxable income, the exact example above. See the full breakdown, including the extra amount for filers 65 and older, on the 2026 standard deduction page.

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

Your marginal rate is the rate on your last dollar of income, the bracket your top slice of income falls into. Your effective rate is your total tax divided by your total taxable income, essentially the average rate across every bracket you passed through. Because of how marginal brackets stack, your effective rate is always lower than your marginal rate unless all of your income sits in the 10% bracket. The effective rate is the more honest number for "what percentage of my income actually went to federal tax."

These ordinary brackets apply to wages, self-employment income, interest, and short-term capital gains. Long-term capital gains and qualified dividends are taxed under a separate, generally lower set of rates. See 2026 capital gains tax rates for how that works and where the breakpoints fall.

How does the IRS set the tax brackets each year?

The seven rates themselves, 10% through 37%, come from the tax code and do not change year to year; Congress made them permanent for individual taxpayers in the 2025 tax law known as the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act. What changes annually is the dollar amount at which each rate kicks in. The IRS recalculates these thresholds each year using a cost-of-living formula, then publishes them in a Revenue Procedure, typically in the fall for the following tax year. The 2026 thresholds came from Revenue Procedure 2025-32, released in October 2025. Because the adjustment is automatic and formula-driven, the brackets widen most years, which on its own can lower your tax bill slightly even if your income only keeps pace with inflation.

The flat truth: know your bracket, but do not fear it

A tax bracket is not a cliff. Crossing into a higher one never costs you money on income you already earned, and it never erases the benefit of a raise. What actually determines your bill is the full stack of brackets your income passes through, plus your standard or itemized deductions. Use the table above to find your bracket, then remember that your effective rate, the number that actually matters for your budget, is always meaningfully lower than the top rate you see next to your name.