March 29, 2011

Effective Income Tax Rates by Income Level

When you hear about taxes you usually hear the marginal tax rates discussed most.   People talk about being in the 25% tax bracket or maybe discuss a new law proposing an increase in the top tax bracket.  The marginal tax rate is what you pay in taxes on each additional dollar earned.    A better picture of your actual tax obligations is your effective tax rate.   Today I'll show what the effective tax rates are for different income levels.

I got the numbers from the IRS statistics site.  The latest figures there were for 2008.

There were 142M total tax filers in 2008.   The total effective tax rate for all payers was 13.9%.  


87% of tax filers had AGI of under $100,000 and paid an effective tax rate below 10%.

Here is at table showing the number of tax filers in each income group and their respective effective tax rates:



# filers % of AGI
No adjusted gross income 2,489,989 0.0%
$1 under $5,000 11,638,707 5.0%
$5,000 under $10,000 12,139,638 2.6%
$10,000 under $15,000 11,702,056 2.9%
$15,000 under $20,000 11,076,002 3.8%
$20,000 under $25,000 9,866,247 5.2%
$25,000 under $30,000 8,743,581 6.2%
$30,000 under $40,000 14,554,280 6.8%
$40,000 under $50,000 11,087,123 7.5%
$50,000 under $75,000 19,196,461 8.5%
$75,000 under $100,000 11,729,485 9.3%
$100,000 under $200,000 13,851,341 12.7%
$200,000 under $500,000 3,476,747 19.6%
$500,000 under $1,000,000 577,618 24.1%
$1,000,000 under $1,500,000 140,635 24.8%
$1,500,000 under $2,000,000 59,460 25.0%
$2,000,000 under $5,000,000 86,329 24.8%
$5,000,000 under $10,000,000 21,390 24.0%
$10,000,000 or more 13,480 21.1%


Here is the data shown graphically :

For the picture I chopped off the data at the $1M income level just to make the picture cleaner.

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