About USTaxTools

Who runs this site

US Tax Tools is an independent publication: US federal and state tax, payroll, and retirement calculators built from official sources.

What stands behind the numbers is process: every rate and threshold is taken from the official source — the IRS, state revenue departments, or the legislation that set it — locked in by an automated test suite, and dated on the page it appears on. When something is wrong, it goes on the corrections page and gets fixed at the source.

The site is funded by advertising served through Google AdSense. We take no affiliate commissions, sponsorships, or payments in exchange for coverage, and no advertiser sees or influences a calculator, an article, or a result before it is published.

Where the numbers come from

Every rate, threshold, cap, bracket, and credit used in a calculation is taken from the body that set it, or from the legislation that changed it:

• the Internal Revenue Service — Revenue Procedures, Notices, publications, and form instructions — for federal brackets, the standard deduction, AMT, credits, and retirement and HSA limits;
• the Social Security Administration for the taxable wage base and the annual cost-of-living adjustment;
• each state's department of revenue (or equivalent tax agency) for state brackets, standard deductions, and estimated-tax rules across all 50 states and the District of Columbia;
• official rate files for sales tax — the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board's rate and boundary files, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, and the Texas Comptroller;
• enacted legislation and the Internal Revenue Code itself where the rule is statutory — for example the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21) provisions on the SALT cap, tips, overtime, and the senior deduction.

Secondary sources — news reports, accounting-firm summaries, competing calculators — are used for cross-checking only, never as the basis for a figure. Pages that carry a substantive number name the official documents behind it in a footer, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on trust. See Methodology & Sources for the full source list and update cadence, and the Editorial Policy for the source hierarchy and review calendar.

How rates are versioned

Federal tax rules are not stored here as a single set of numbers that gets edited each January. They are stored per tax year, in one central configuration, and read from there by every calculator, reference page, and article that mentions them — so an IRS inflation adjustment lands in one place rather than being chased through prose. State brackets are held the same way, keyed by year, because states amend rates on their own legislative timetables.

Superseded years are kept rather than overwritten. Where a calculator offers a tax-year selector it computes an earlier year with that year's own rules, and a page written about a particular year stays pinned to that year after the year turns over, because someone amending an earlier return needs that year's answer.

How the calculations are checked

The calculation logic is written separately from the interface specifically so it can be tested, and it is — several hundred automated test files run on every change before anything is published. The tests concentrate on where tax code actually breaks:

• boundary cases — the exact income at which a bracket, phase-out, or wage base starts, and the dollar either side of a cap;
• anchor cases — figures pinned to a specific published IRS Revenue Procedure or SSA fact sheet, so an unintended edit to a rate fails the build;
• regression cases — a confirmed error becomes a test asserting the right answer before it becomes a fix, so the same defect cannot come back unnoticed;
• historical years — prior tax years are asserted as well as the current one;
• a rollover smoke test that fails the build when a new tax year has been applied to some parts of the site but not all of them, plus freshness guards that fail when a generated sales-tax dataset goes stale.

Substantive pages show when they were last reviewed. That date is derived from the page's own revision history rather than typed by hand, so it cannot be inflated by a site-wide rebuild.

What we publish

• Federal income tax brackets, rates, and effective/marginal rate calculations
• FICA, self-employment, and Additional Medicare / net investment income tax
• Capital gains, dividends, equity compensation (RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, ESPP), and crypto
• Retirement accounts — 401(k), IRA, Roth conversions, RMDs, and early-withdrawal rules
• Deductions and credits — standard vs itemized, SALT, CTC, EITC, education, and OBBBA-era deductions
• State income tax for all 50 states and DC, plus property, sales, and estate tax
• Reference pages, a tax glossary, form and box explainers, and tax insight articles

All calculators cover the current and prior tax years and all five filing statuses: Single, Married Filing Jointly, Married Filing Separately, Head of Household, and Qualifying Surviving Spouse.

What this site is not

• Not a CPA firm, enrolled agent, or paid tax preparer. No license or PTIN is held, no professional body membership is claimed, and using a calculator creates no engagement of any kind.
• Not a source of personal tax advice. Everything here is general information about how a published rule works, applied to figures you enter. It cannot tell you what to put on your own return, and it cannot represent you before the IRS — that needs a CPA, enrolled agent, or attorney.
• Not affiliated with the IRS, the SSA, or any state revenue department. They are sources; none of them endorses, reviews, or is connected to this site.

Your data

Calculations run in your browser. The figures you type into a calculator stay on your device — this is a static site with no backend that could receive them. We use Google Analytics for anonymous, aggregate usage and Google AdSense for advertising, both covered by our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with the IRS, the SSA, or a state department of revenue, we want to know. Email contact@ustax.tools with the page URL, the inputs you used, and the official source that says otherwise. What happens after that is set out on our Corrections page.

Part of the TaxTools Network

US Tax Tools is part of the TaxTools Network — independent tax calculators and tools built from official government sources for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The network sites do not share content or rebadge each other's calculators: each one implements its own country's rules on its own country's tax calendar, because a calculator that generalises across jurisdictions is wrong in all of them. What they share is the published standard they are built to and the methodology they follow.

Compliance and transparency

• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Terms of Use
• Disclaimer
• Editorial Policy
• Corrections
• Contact