|
Federal Income Tax Caculation
This calculator is to find out Your federal income tax for income within USA for 2018 to 2026. With a lot of changes in tax law starting from 2018, I had to modify the calculator. The calculator for years 2017 and before is now a separate calculator on the same page. Form 1040 has changed completely, where it's very simple 1 page with only 23 lines in it. Std deduction has been doubled while personal exemption has been eliminated, resulting in net wash (So, there is little incentive to itemize deductions). However, $2K child credit has been added for every dependent child, so that helps, resulting in lower taxes by about 5% compared to earlier years.
It's a very simplistic calculator. It's only meant for people who are married, filing jointly and have a combined income between $100K - $350K. So, tax filing status only shows returns which are "married filing jointly". Calculator might still work for people making < $100K or more than $350K, but there are lot more credits at lower income, and lot more expiring deductions at higher income, which my calculator doesn't take into account. Nevertheless it can still give you a ballpark number.
Calculator also shows Social security tax and medicare tax but not state income taxes. Note that social security tax and medicare tax have nothing to do with federal income tax, but are shown here so that you know if you overpaid for them (this can happen for social security tax in situations where you have multiple jobs in a year, and each employer deducts social security tax assuming that's your only job).
Calculator shows any child credit that you receive for kids or other dependents. For most simplistic returns, only info from W2 form needs to be filled, since there are no other income sources. Enter the correct number of kids + other dependents, and leave all other entries at default of 0. Click on "calculate" to see the results.
- Enter Wages/Salaries from your W2 form box. If multiple W2 forms from one or both partners, add up wages. SS and medicare should be entered separately for each spouse, to check if either of them overpaid. Any excess SS tax paid will show up as credit on line 17 of form 1040
- Enter Total Interest that you received from banks/brokerage firms
- Enter Dividend and any capital gain/loss from your stock sale (short term is for stocks held less than a year). All dividends entered here are considered qualified dividend (i.e lower tax rate applies on them). This is true for most of the stock dividend you receive
- If you own house, enter Propery tax and Mortgage interest paid
- Enter all charity contribution, state income tax paid and all sales tax paid. If you do not want to save all sales tax receipt, you can use IRS sales tax calculator on irs.gov to give you a standard sales tax amount that you can use to deduct. The amount you get from there is usually much higher than the sales tax that you would have paid, so it's advisable to use standard sales tax amount
- Enter dependents (include you, your spouse, your kids, and any other dependent who passes "residency test".
- Enter Federal/SS/Medicare tax withheld from your paycheck. This is used to estimate your refund.
|