2026 Tax Brackets and the Standard Deduction, Explained

Every autumn the IRS republishes the numbers the next tax year runs on. For 2026 — the returns filed in early 2027 — those numbers come from Revenue Procedure 2025-32, released on October 9, 2025, and they carry a second author: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which made the 2017 rate structure permanent and lifted the standard deduction beyond what inflation alone would have produced. The rates themselves have not changed in nine years. What changed is where the lines sit, and whether they were ever going to move again. The Tax Desk lays out the full 2026 schedule and the one idea that makes brackets make sense.

Key Takeaways

• The seven rates — 10% to 37% — are unchanged for 2026 and are now permanent; only the income thresholds moved, with inflation.
• The 2026 standard deduction is $16,100 single, $32,200 married filing jointly, and $24,150 head of household.
• Brackets are marginal: only the dollars inside each bracket are taxed at that bracket’s rate, so your effective rate is always below your top rate.

The 2026 standard deduction

For tax year 2026 the standard deduction is $16,100 for single filers and for married individuals filing separately, $32,200 for married couples filing jointly and surviving spouses, and $24,150 for heads of household. The 2025 figures, after the Act’s adjustment, were $15,750, $31,500, and $23,625 respectively — so the year-over-year rise is $350 single, $700 joint, and $525 head of household. The standard deduction is the amount of income that is simply not taxed for anyone who does not itemize, and because the Act raised the 2025 base before the 2026 inflation adjustment was applied, the 2026 figures sit higher than a pure inflation update on the old law would have produced.

The seven brackets for 2026

The rates are 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37%. The thresholds below are taxable income — income after deductions — and come directly from Revenue Procedure 2025-32 as summarized in IRS release IR-2025-103.

Single filers: 10% on income up to $12,400; 12% over $12,400; 22% over $50,400; 24% over $105,700; 32% over $201,775; 35% over $256,225; and 37% over $640,600.

Married filing jointly: 10% on income up to $24,800; 12% over $24,800; 22% over $100,800; 24% over $211,400; 32% over $403,550; 35% over $512,450; and 37% over $768,700.

Head of household: 10% up to $17,000; 12% over $17,000; 22% over $64,850; 24% over $105,700; 32% over $201,775; 35% over $256,225; and 37% over $640,600. Married filing separately uses the single thresholds for most brackets, with the 37% rate starting over $384,350.

Two details in the schedule reward attention. The joint thresholds are exactly double the single thresholds through the 32% bracket — the marriage penalty that once sat in the middle brackets stays removed — before narrowing at the top, where the joint 37% threshold of $768,700 is well below double the single $640,600. And for 2026, the Act directed a larger inflation adjustment for the two lowest brackets than for the rest: the 10% and 12% ceilings rose by roughly 4%, against roughly 2.3% for the higher thresholds, a deliberate widening of the lowest-cost income.

Marginal versus effective: the worked example

The most persistent misunderstanding in U.S. taxes is the belief that moving into a higher bracket taxes all of your income at the higher rate. It does not. Each rate applies only to the slice of taxable income inside its bracket — the system is marginal, and a raise can never make you worse off after federal income tax on that mechanism alone.

Take a single filer with $80,000 of taxable income in 2026 — that is income after the standard deduction and any other deductions. The tax is built in slices. The first $12,400 is taxed at 10%: $1,240. The next slice, from $12,400 to $50,400 — $38,000 — is taxed at 12%: $4,560. The remaining slice, from $50,400 to $80,000 — $29,600 — is taxed at 22%: $6,512. Total tax: $1,240 + $4,560 + $6,512 = $12,312.

This filer’s marginal rate is 22% — the rate on the last dollar earned — but the effective rate, the share of taxable income actually paid, is $12,312 ÷ $80,000 = 15.4%. The gap between those two numbers is not a loophole; it is the design. When you model a bonus, a Roth conversion, or a capital gain, the marginal rate prices the decision and the effective rate describes the outcome. Test both figures for your own income in the Income Tax Estimator, and see how the new deductions layer on in our explainers on the Tax Desk.

What the Act changed, and what is just inflation

It helps to separate the two forces in the 2026 numbers. The routine force is the annual inflation adjustment: more than 60 provisions indexed to chained CPI so that cost-of-living pay rises do not push taxpayers into higher brackets — bracket creep, in the standard phrase. That mechanism alone explains most of the threshold movement, as it did in years before the Act.

The Act’s own changes are structural. First, permanence: the seven rates were scheduled to expire after 2025 and revert to the higher pre-2018 schedule — 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, 39.6% at the top. The Act removed the sunset, so the 10%-to-37% structure is now the standing law, and future Rev. Procs. will adjust thresholds around rates that no longer carry an expiry date. Second, the enhanced standard deduction: the Act reset the 2025 standard deduction to $15,750 single and $31,500 joint, above the previously announced figures, and the 2026 amounts are indexed from that higher base. Third, the extra adjustment to the bottom two brackets noted above. What the Act did not do is change any of the seven rates themselves — the argument in Congress was over permanence and deductions, not over the rate table.

Other 2026 figures from the same release are worth filing away: the estate tax basic exclusion rises to $15,000,000; the annual gift exclusion holds at $19,000; the alternative minimum tax exemption is $90,100 for single filers, phasing out from $500,000; and personal exemptions remain at zero, an elimination the Act made permanent. The brackets and the standard deduction, though, are the two numbers that touch nearly every return — and for 2026, both are settled law rather than scheduled change.

Educational coverage — not tax advice.