The 2026 Federal Tax Brackets Keep the TCJA's Seven Rates, Permanently

For tax year 2026 (the return you will file in early 2027), the federal income tax keeps the bracket structure it has run on since 2018: seven rates, from 10% on a single filer's first $12,400 of taxable income to 37.00% above $640,600, with a standard deduction of $16,100 (Rev. Proc. 2025-32).

None of it expires anymore: §70101 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025) struck the sunset from 26 U.S.C. §1(j), the subsection that carries these rates, so the statute now applies them to every taxable year beginning after December 31, 2017, with no end date. 2026 is the ninth tax year on this schedule and the first with nothing scheduled to replace it.

What a single filer pays for tax year 2026

Brackets are layers. Each rate applies only to the slice of taxable income inside its own band, so crossing a line changes what your next dollar pays and leaves every dollar below the line taxed as before. The 2026 bands for a single filer, with the formula the IRS prints for each:

Source: Rev. Proc. 2025-32, Table 3, §1(j)(2)(C). For married couples filing jointly the 2026 bands are wider: the 22% rate starts at $100,800 of taxable income and the 37% rate above $768,700 (IRS, tax year 2026 adjustments).

The arithmetic at $65,000

Take TaxMath's reference filer: $65,000 of wages, one W-2, standard deduction, single, roughly the median full-time wage. For tax year 2026:

• $65,000 minus the $16,100 standard deduction leaves $48,900 of taxable income.
• The first $12,400 is taxed at 10%: $1,240.00.
• The remaining $36,500 sits in the 12% band: $4,380.00.
• Federal income tax before credits: $5,620, or 8.6% of gross income.

The whole return fits inside the bottom two brackets, which was not true a year earlier. In tax year 2025 the standard deduction was $15,750 (raised for 2025 onward by OBBBA §70102) and the 22% bracket began at $48,475 (Rev. Proc. 2024-40), so the same wage left $49,250 taxable and pushed its last $775 into the 22% band, for a bill of $5,749 ($1,192.50 + $4,386.00 + $170.50). The 2026 tables cut this filer's bill by $129 and cut the marginal rate from 22% to 12%.

Two bracket edges grew 4%; the rest grew 2.3%

From 2025 to 2026 the 12% bracket's ceiling rose from $48,475 to $50,400, a 4.0% jump, while every edge above it rose about 2.3% ($626,350 to $640,600 at the top). The gap is deliberate: as amended by the OBBBA, §1(j)(3) indexes the 10% and 12% bracket ceilings from a calendar-2016 base, one year earlier than the base used for the edges above them, handing the bottom of the schedule an extra year of inflation that every later year inherits. That widened 12% band is what lifted the $65,000 filer above out of the 22% bracket.

The sunset §70101 repealed

§11001 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act applied today's rates only to taxable years "beginning after December 31, 2017, and before January 1, 2026." Past that date, the pre-2018 schedule still printed in §1(a)–(d) and (i) would have resumed: a 39.6% top rate, with 15%, 25% and 28% across the middle where 12%, 22% and 24% now sit. Eight filing seasons of planning content were written around that reversion. What it would have cost in dollars cannot be stated exactly, because the IRS never published inflation-adjusted pre-TCJA tables for 2026; the direction needs no table, since every rate from the second bracket up was higher. §70101 settled the question by deleting the date.

The other 2026 numbers the same revenue procedure sets

The bracket edges move every fall: the statute indexes them to inflation, and the IRS publishes each year's adjusted figures as a revenue procedure in the Internal Revenue Bulletin. Rev. Proc. 2025-32 is the 2026 edition, and the brackets are a fraction of what it sets.

The 2026 standard deduction is $16,100 for single filers, $32,200 married filing jointly, and $24,150 for heads of household (Rev. Proc. 2025-32). OBBBA §70102 rewrote §63(c)(7) to make the enlarged deduction permanent and raise its base; personal exemptions stay at zero.

Long-term capital gains keep separate thresholds. For a single filer in 2026 the 0% rate runs to $49,450 of taxable income, 15% from there to $545,500, and 20% beyond (Rev. Proc. 2025-32).

Two figures were reset by the OBBBA itself rather than by the inflation formula. The 2026 AMT exemption is $90,100 for a single filer, and its phase-out now begins at $500,000, down from $626,350 in 2025 (Rev. Proc. 2024-40), because §70107 reset the thresholds downward when it made the larger exemption permanent in §55(d)(4). And the child tax credit is $2,200 per qualifying child for 2026, up to $1,700 of it refundable: §70104 raised the TCJA's $2,000 beginning in tax year 2025 and indexed it (Rev. Proc. 2025-32). The estate and gift exclusion, raised to $15,000,000 for 2026 by §70106, has its own article.

Everything above is the federal layer, and it is identical wherever you live. The state layer stacked on it varies: nine states levy no income tax at all, California's schedule tops out at 13.30%, and the fleet ranking prices that layer for the same $65,000 filer in all 51 jurisdictions. To see both layers on your own number, the calculator runs them together.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax advice. Consult a qualified tax professional for guidance specific to your situation.