2027 Federal Tax Brackets: IRS Status and Projections

Where Things Stand

The IRS adjusts brackets, the standard deduction and dozens of other amounts for inflation once a year, in a single revenue procedure. For tax year 2026 those figures arrived as release IR-2025-103. Nothing equivalent exists for 2027: the IRS page that tracks these releases, “Inflation-adjusted tax items by tax year,” still lists 2026 as the most recent year.

Read every 2027 number on this page as an estimate. If you need to withhold, file or plan against 2027 rules, use the IRS release when it lands — not a projection, and not this page.

Both projection sources expect the official amounts in late October or early November 2026. Until then the honest answer to “what are the 2027 tax brackets?” is that they do not exist yet in official form.

What Is Already Official for 2027

The Social Security Administration keeps its own calendar and published its 2027 figures on October 14, 2026, ahead of the IRS. These are final, not projected, and they do move money in a paycheck.

The wage base is the ceiling on wages subject to the 6.2 percent Social Security tax. At the 2027 ceiling an employee pays $11,922.60 across the year — $483.60 more than the same position paid at the 2026 ceiling. Medicare has no ceiling, so that 1.45 percent applies to every dollar.

Projected 2027 Federal Tax Brackets

Thomson Reuters Checkpoint and Wolters Kluwer each published a complete 2027 rate schedule. The thresholds match exactly between them. That is expected — both derive the numbers from the same published price index — and it is not confirmation by the IRS.

Projected figures, not IRS figures. The 32 percent bracket starts at the same $208,325 for single and head-of-household filers in both projections; that is what the sources publish, not a transcription error here.

Brackets are marginal. A filer in the 22 percent bracket pays 22 percent only on the income inside that band, while every dollar below it is taxed at the lower rates.

Projected 2027 Standard Deduction

The two sources disagree on exactly one figure. Wolters Kluwer projects $24,950 for head of household; Thomson Reuters projects $24,900. This page shows the Thomson Reuters figure. The gap is a single $50 rounding step and it moves no bracket.

Notice why the other two rows match exactly. 26 U.S.C. § 63(c)(2)(A) defines the joint amount as 200 percent of the single amount, so those two are locked together and both sources land on $33,200. Head of household is a separately indexed figure under § 63(c)(2)(B), which is why it can fall on either side of 150 percent of the single amount once each figure is rounded to a multiple of $50.

Other Projected 2027 Figures

These appear in both projections and matter when you file a full return. None of them enter the paycheck math on this site, which covers federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare and state tax.

What the Projection Means by Income Level

Wider brackets and a slightly larger standard deduction mean slightly less federal income tax on the same gross pay. These are the arithmetic of the projections above, applied to four round incomes so you can check any of them: $50,000, $75,000, $100,000 and $150,000.

Federal income tax only, after the standard deduction, before credits, rounded to the nearest dollar. “Change per paycheck” is the annual difference divided by 26 biweekly paychecks. Social Security and Medicare are unchanged by these projections except through the wage base above, and state tax is untouched.

Why the Official Numbers Could Differ

The inflation adjustment uses a twelve-month average of the consumer price index ending in August before the tax year. For 2027 that window runs from September 2025 to August 2026. Because of the 2025 government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics never published a CPI figure for October 2025, which leaves eleven months of data instead of twelve.

Thomson Reuters states that it filled the gap with the eleven published months. Wolters Kluwer warns that the missing October 2025 figure could push the official IRS amounts away from any projection. Neither firm has the IRS’s own calculation, and the IRS rounds each adjusted amount to a multiple of $50, so a small difference in the index moves a threshold by a full step.

The direction matters less than the size. A one-step difference in a bracket threshold changes the tax on income that crosses it by a few dollars, not by a percentage point of your pay.

What This Calculator Uses

The paycheck calculator on this site runs on final 2026 figures: the brackets and standard deduction from IR-2025-103, and the $184,500 Social Security wage base. That is deliberate. A projection is not a withholding table, and switching the engine to estimated numbers would make every take-home estimate wrong in a way you could not see.

The engine moves to 2027 only after the IRS publishes the official amounts, in a separate change with its own tests. Until then, the projection above is background for planning — not an input to your paycheck.

Related: how state tax works when you work remotely, every state’s rates and standard deduction, and how this calculator computes each deduction.

Sources

All sources below were accessed on October 20, 2026.

Common Questions