4.25% in payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare), federal income taxes range based on how much you make and how big your family is. Large family making little, 0%; Single making $120k, your highest marginal rate is 28% but it will average out to an effective rate around 17% in my experience. State taxes range from 0% in Texas to what the other posts say about California.
When comparing alternatives you want to look at marginal rate. Above $82k, your marginal tax rate is: 24% federal income + 6.3% social security + 1.45% medicare + 9.3% California + 1.5% San Francisco for a total of 43%. This is not the same thing as paying half your income in taxes, but it is paying (nearly) half the additional income in taxes.
For (single) self-employed people making between ~$85k and $137k, the marginal federal tax rate they face is a little under 40%, with 24% from your link, ~12% from Social security, and ~3% from Medicare. This excludes the effect of phaseouts of various deductions (eg, student loan interest), which can easily drive that higher while remaining within the context of federal taxation only.
Federal + FICA for self-employed is barely 30% for that income and state is going to be well under 10%. Flat tax states will be 3-5% (or 0%) and even California is barely 5% effective rate.
Even assuming you live in a very high tax State like California, 50% marginal tax rate put you in, or close to the highest possible tax bracket. I live in a high tax state and earned above median income and my taxes (federal, state, medicare, and SS combined) was about 25% last year.
Let's say you make $1,000,000 a year in California. Your effective tax rate is 11.78 percent because the top 12.3% rate is only applied to income you earned over $599k. (13.3% applies only on income above $1,000,000, which you are too poor to pay yet).
Same with federal taxes, that $1,000,000 earner is going to pay an effective rate of 33.3%. Combined, you are paying 45% state and federal income tax.
If you're making 100K in California, your marginal tax rate is:
- Federal: 24%
- State: 9.3%
- FICA: 7.65% (6.2% social security, 1.45% medicare)
- SDI: 1%
This gets you to 42%. Your employer matches the FICA payments too, so that's closer to 50% of your take-home pay.
Once you make enough to pay off the regressive FICA taxes ($142K) you get bumped back down to "just" the mid-high 30% range briefly, until you hit $163K, then its back up to 40% again.
These are the state income tax rates; Federal income taxes are on top of that. The bottom Federal rate is effectively zero, and tops out at 35% for marginal income over about $380K.
A single person making $200k/year in San Francisco will pay an effective rate of 34% in federal, state, and payroll taxes. Only your marginal rate is above 40%, but income taxes are of course graduated.
You don’t hit 40% until about $400k (in SF at least). So ya, if you are paying 40%, you are definitely in the 1%.
State income tax is not generally the important part. From a quick search, the highest rate in the nation is 13.3% in California. The Federal income tax rate tops out at 37%, and there's also 7.65% Federal payroll tax.
Even for a married couple earning 500k in high-income-tax California, effective tax rate (as opposed to marginal tax rate) is only 30-35%, and that includes the employee portion of Medicare/social security (the latter of which cuts out around 110k).
The exact effective tax rate will vary mostly with your mortgage interest deduction.
Is "close to 50%" the going marginal tax rate in general? I calculate ~30% federal + ~10% California + possibly ~6% social security & Medicare to get that number; did I miss anything? (current grad student with a marginal rate a lot closer to 20%, haven't had the joy of full-on taxes yet)
These numbers don't add up for me. I make just over six figures a year and my effective tax rate at the end of every year is roughly 20% (according to TurboTax). Single, no kids, no house.
As tptacek pointed out you are ignoring that the state tax is federally deductible and that the income tax rate at the 25% bracket is the marginal rate.
That is such a simplification of income tax though. For example a family of 4 making $50k/yr pays about $40 in federal income taxes. If that same family make $75k it goes up to about $2500. Both of those as a percentage of income are far below 15%. Hell, I made more than the SS max last year and my effective tax rate was below 15%. See Mike Pence as another example, guy made over $100k and had an effective rate of something like 12%.
It doesn't make any sense to add up the highest marginal tax rates like that though.
In your example of someone earning $90k in CA, the federal income tax rate of 28% only applies to the $2150 of income above the threshold of $87,850, the rest is taxed at lower rates according to the lower brackets. The same applies to state taxes, except the brackets are different.
The effective tax rate (e.g. the total amount of tax you pay / your total income) has a lot more meaning, and that one is a lot lower than 50%.
The original claim that started this thread, "Personal income taxes are about 50% in the US", is not true at all.
How do you manage to get an effective 40% tax rate in California? I could see that as a marginal rate on the last few dollars, but you'd have to make in the millions to get there for your overall tax rate.
For example, if you make $100k and take only the standard deduction, you'll pay $19k in federal taxes (19%) and $6k in California taxes (6%), for 25% total. If you include payroll taxes, that's another ~7.5%, so 32.5%. Of course, many people take much larger deductions than the standard deduction, so pay considerably less.
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