Year over year

What Changed for 2026 Taxes

Tax year 2026 brings a second round of adjustments on top of the structural changes enacted the year before. Most of the movement is ordinary indexation, but a handful of provisions changed in ways that affect what a return looks like rather than only what it costs.

This page collects the figures that moved, puts both years side by side, and links to the calculator that applies each one. Every value traces back to the agency release that states it.

The standard deduction and the bracket thresholds

The standard deduction for a single filer rises from $15,750 to $16,100. A joint return moves from $31,500 to $32,200, and head of household from $23,625 to $24,150. Married filing separately tracks the single amount at $16,100.

The seven rates themselves are unchanged. What moved are the income levels at which each one begins: for a single filer the 37% rate now starts above $640,600 of taxable income, and for a joint return above $768,700. Because only the thresholds are indexed, the shape of the schedule stays fixed and every step simply shifts upward.

Retirement and health account limits

The 401(k) elective deferral limit rises to $24,500 from $23,500, with an $8,000 catch-up from age 50. Savers aged 60 to 63 get a larger catch-up of $11,250, which brings their total to $35,750 and then drops back at 64. The IRA limit rises to $7,500 with a $1,100 catch-up, and SIMPLE plans move to $17,000.

Health savings account limits rise to $4,400 for self-only coverage and $8,750 for family coverage. The $1,000 catch-up from age 55 is set by statute and has never been indexed, which is why it is identical in every year of the published tables.

The Social Security wage base moves from $176,100 to $184,500, which is the figure that caps the 6.2% payroll tax and the 12.4% self-employment equivalent. Every dollar above it attracts Medicare only.

Mileage rates changed in the middle of the year

The business mileage rate started 2026 at 72.5 cents and was revised to 76 cents for miles driven from July 1. Medical and moving rates moved from 20.5 to 23.5 cents at the same boundary. The charitable rate stayed at 14 cents, because it is fixed by statute rather than by the annual cost study.

This is the first mid-year revision since 2022, and it breaks any method that multiplies annual miles by a single rate. A deduction built on total miles without splitting the year is wrong in one direction or the other depending on when the driving happened.

Credits, exclusions and the senior deduction

The maximum adoption credit rises to $17,670 from $17,280, of which $5,120 may be refundable. The estate basic exclusion rises to $15,000,000 from $13,990,000, a larger jump than indexation alone would produce.

The temporary senior deduction remains $6,000 per qualifying individual and $12,000 where both spouses qualify, with a phaseout that starts at $75,000 of modified adjusted gross income for a single filer and $150,000 for a joint return. The IRS states that it applies to tax years 2025 through 2028, so it is scheduled to disappear rather than continue.

The child and dependent care credit kept its $3,000 and $6,000 expense caps but the maximum credit rate rose from 35% to 50% of qualifying expenses. That change alters the value of the credit far more than indexation would have.

What did not move

Several figures are fixed by statute and are therefore identical in both years. The annual gift exclusion stays at $19,000, the net investment income tax stays at 3.8% above $200,000 for a single filer and $250,000 for a joint return, and the additional Medicare tax stays at 0.9% above the same two thresholds. None of those thresholds are indexed, so inflation quietly moves more taxpayers into them each year.

The personal exemption remains at zero. It was eliminated by the 2017 Act and that elimination was made permanent, which is why the senior deduction described above was created as a separate provision rather than as a restored exemption.

How to use this list

Each figure above has a calculator on this site that applies it, and each calculator states the release it draws from. If a number here does not match the linked release, the release is correct: report the discrepancy and the shared data file behind every page will be corrected at once.

Questions about these changes

Calculators that apply these figures