New Financial Planner Starter Kit

Professional Investment Portfolio Building Kit

All you do is input your gross income, exemptions, deductions, and it estimates how much as a percent in Federal tax you're paying. This is just about the only calculator you can buy that performs this function so easily.

This is useful for generating input data that goes into financial/retirement planning software. Because these programs are designed to take your total situation into account (income from all sources), and not just the additional (marginal) income from an investment, using marginal tax rates is not correct, and substantially overstates taxes due, especially if you're retired. Average is the only way to get Real World results.

Taking the total amount of Federal taxes you actually pay, and dividing that amount by your gross income finds your average Federal tax bracket. People in 28% marginal brackets are surprised to find that their average bracket can be as low as 9%! In other words, only 9% of their gross incomes are being paid in Federal taxes.

This tax calculator does not account for state, Social Security, Medicare, Local, nor other taxes.

It has a sheet for Single, Married Filing Jointly, Married Filing Separately, and Head of Household.

Directions: First select which of the four sheets to use based on filing status.

Then input data into the three green-shaded input fields.

Then using the resulting Taxable Income number, scroll down to find the corresponding Tax Rate in the body of the spreadsheet. The Average Federal Tax percentage is in the column to the right. If there's two numbers, then it's a number that's not an even thousand, so it's your call on how to round it.