Estate Tax Calculator

Federal estate tax on an inheritance above the exemption.

Withholding is only an estimate, settled every April, and the W-4 controls how much comes out by declaring dependants and extra income. Self-employed workers pay both halves of FICA through self-employment tax, and quarterly estimated payments take the place of employer withholding.

Federal income tax in the United States is progressive: income is taxed in brackets, each rate applying only to the slice of income inside it, so a raise never lowers take-home pay. FICA sits on top — 6.2% for Social Security up to an annual wage base and 1.45% for Medicare, plus 0.9% extra above a high-earner threshold — and most states add an income tax of their own.

Employers withhold against projected annual income.

Inflation-adjusted bracket thresholds change most years, so the same salary can move into a neighbouring bracket without anything about the job changing.

Marginal and effective rates are different numbers, and the bracket that applies to the last dollar of income is not the share of income actually paid. FICA stops at the Social Security wage base while Medicare does not, and the additional Medicare tax applies only above a high threshold.

Estate Tax Calculator sits with the rest of the library's finance work, and it rests on the same payroll and filing arithmetic the way a lender's disclosure or a bank statement does. Its answer is only as good as the assumptions standing behind it.

The quantities it works from — gross estate, exemption and estate tax rate — are the ones a real payroll and filing question actually turns on, and each carries a convention of its own, set out below.

Money questions in America turn on the same few trade-offs: how long a balance is carried, what rate applies to it, and whether the money is being paid down or built up. Inflation sits behind all of them, since a figure that looks generous at today's prices buys less at tomorrow's, and comparisons across decades are made in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

American products also disclose their costs in prescribed ways, from the APR on a consumer loan to the annual percentage yield on a deposit account.