2026 2027 Federal Income Tax Calculator for Retirees

A reader suggested that I release my tax calculator for retirees under a separate title because it has outgrown its original purpose.

I initially made a calculator only for the taxable portion of Social Security benefits. Many questions from readers made me realize that they were also looking for the resulting taxes from their Social Security benefits and other income. I added the tax calculation and expanded the scope over time.

Why Another Tax Calculator

There are many tax calculators online already. However, most of them only look backward, not forward. The 2027 tax brackets will be known by September 2026, but most online tax calculators don’t update to 2027 until well into 2027. Because I track tax brackets even before the IRS officially publishes them, my tax calculator will cover next year sooner than any other, giving you an early start on planning.

TurboTax desktop software has a What-If Worksheet for planning (I wrote about it in Tax Planning with TurboTax What-If Worksheet). It works to some degree, but it’s missing some important pieces. Notably, it doesn’t include the ACA premium tax credit for retirees not yet on Medicare. Most other tax calculators online don’t include the ACA premium tax credit either. That’s the case in the popular Dinkytown 1040 Tax Calculator and its licensed clones on AARP and other websites.

Other tax software programs don’t even do 2026 until November, when they release the 2026 version. The early releases are often still incomplete at the time. In general, tax software is intended for filing, not for planning.

AI is quite good these days, but as I wrote in Which AI Calculates Taxes Correctly?, a tax calculator is faster and more accurate than AI if you know which one to use.

Some niche tax calculators update early and are more complete. Case Study Spreadsheet and Excel1040 are two good ones I know. I wrote about Case Study Spreadsheet in Roth Conversion with Social Security and Medicare IRMAA. Both Case Study Spreadsheet and Excel1040 require more upfront setup, though. The calculator I made is less comprehensive but easier to get a quick calculation.

Why Retirees

I specifically made this tax calculator only for retirees.

Retirees’ taxes are simpler. They don’t have deductions and credits related to children and education, such as the Child Tax Credit, Child and Dependent Care Credit, American Opportunity Credit, or the Student Loan Interest Deduction. The calculator can be made simpler when I don’t need to include inputs for those things.

Meanwhile, retirees have a greater need for a tax calculator to set up withholding and estimated tax payments. They also have more control over the sources of their income. Taxable income can come from IRA withdrawals, capital gains, or Roth conversions. A tax calculator is helpful to compare different approaches.

What’s Included

This calculator covers pretty much everything relevant to retirees:

• Social Security benefits
• Muni bond interest
• Qualified dividends and long-term capital gains
• Rentals, interest, non-qualified dividends, short-term capital gains
• Wages, pension, IRA withdrawals, Roth conversions
• Qualified Business Income deduction (from self-employment or REIT dividends)
• Net Investment Income Tax
• Above-the-line deductions
• Standard Deduction
• Cash donations made directly to charities
• Senior Deduction
• Itemized deductions
  • Non-cash donations and donations to Donor Advised Funds
  • State and local taxes (SALT) paid
  • Medical expenses
  • Mortgage interest
• ACA Premium Tax Credit

I picked these for their relevance to retirees. The less-used itemized deductions and ACA tax credit are collapsed by default. You can easily skip those if you don’t have them, but you can still dive in when you do.

What’s Not Included

Besides things not relevant to retirees, this calculator doesn’t cover these items:

• Self-employment tax
• Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
• Foreign Tax Credit

These are more complicated, and most retirees don’t have them. Collecting inputs to calculate them would make the calculator more crowded for the vast majority of users. In addition, the calculator only calculates the federal income tax. It doesn’t calculate state and local taxes.

Calculator

The calculator does both 2025 and 2026. You can double-check the 2025 results against your filed 2025 tax return. When you see that the calculator is correct for 2025, you’ll be confident that it’s also correct for 2026. I’ll update it to include 2027 as soon as I have a good handle on the 2027 tax brackets.

Calculating for Tax Year	2025 2026
Tax Filing Status:	Single Head of Household Married Filing Jointly Married Filing Separately
I’m 65+ by 12/31
Spouse (if filing jointly) is 65+ by 12/31
Social Security benefits (gross, annual):
Investment Income:
– Muni bond interest
– Qualified dividends and long-term capital gains
– Other investment income (rentals, interest, non-qualified dividends, short-term capital gains, …)
Other income (wages, pension, IRA withdrawals, Roth conversion, …):
Active Qualified Business Income included above (self-employment with material participation):
Other Qualified Business Income included above (199A dividends, business income without material participation):
Above-the-line deductions. These include deductible contributions to HSA, traditional IRA, SEP-IRA, and SIMPLE IRA, and deductible self-employment tax and self-employment health insurance. Most retirees don’t have these.
Cash donations made directly to charities (outside of QCD):
▼Itemizing Deductions (expand if you think you may itemize instead of taking the standard deduction)
– Non-cash donations and donations to Donor Advised Funds
– State and local taxes
– Medical expenses
– Other itemizable deductions (mortgage interest, …)
ACA health insurance (check if you’re on ACA health insurance):
– Household size
– State of residence:	Lower 48 Alaska Hawaii
– Full price of the policy chosen (monthly)
– Net price after the subsidy (monthly)
– Full price of the second-lowest cost Silver plan (monthly)
– Number of months on ACA policy during the year

$ of your Social Security benefits is taxable, which means % of your benefits is tax-free.

Your federal income tax is approximately $.

This is calculated from a taxable income of $ (AGI $ – Standard Deduction $Itemized Deductions $ – QBI Deduction $ – Senior Deduction $ – charitable contribution deduction $). The calculated tax includes $ in Net Investment Income Tax and $ in .