About Ledgerwise

Why this site exists

Most online tax calculators give you a number and nothing else. You cannot see which bracket did what, which deduction was applied, or where the underlying rates came from. When two calculators disagree — and they often do — there is no way to work out which one is wrong.

Every calculator here shows its intermediate steps: gross income, adjustments, adjusted gross income, the deduction applied, taxable income, the tax charged in each rate band, credits, and payments. If you disagree with the answer, you can see exactly which line to argue with.

What we publish, and what we hold back

The rule is simple: a figure appears in a calculator only if it can be traced to a primary government publication. Not a news article, not a competitor's website, not a plausible extrapolation from last year.

This has consequences you can see across the site. There is no state income tax calculator, because 2026 state rate schedules had not been confirmed against each state's revenue department. The federal calculator excludes the refundable portion of the child tax credit and does not apply a SALT deduction cap, because neither 2026 figure could be confirmed. Several calculators are listed as in development rather than shipped with placeholder rates.

A calculator that looks authoritative while being wrong is worse than one that admits what it does not know. Where an omission affects your result, the calculator says so in the results panel rather than hiding it in the small print.

How the calculations are built

The tax logic is separated entirely from the interface. Calculation functions take plain numbers and return plain numbers; they never read the page or write to it. That separation means the arithmetic can be tested directly, and it is — over two hundred unit tests run against the engine.

The bracket tests are worth singling out. Rev. Proc. 2025-32 publishes each rate band as a cumulative dollar amount plus a marginal rate, so the tests check our output against the IRS's own arithmetic at every bracket edge, for every filing status. Expected values were transcribed from the published tables, not generated by running the code.

Money is handled as integer cents throughout. Binary floating point cannot represent most decimal money values exactly, and progressive brackets multiply that error by every band they cross.

Independence

Ledgerwise is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, any state revenue department, or any other government agency. We link to official sources so you can check our work, not to imply any relationship with them.

The site is supported by advertising. Ad placements are kept out of the input form and away from the results so they cannot be mistaken for part of a calculation, and every ad slot reserves its space in advance so a loading advert never pushes the calculator around.

What this site is not

These are estimation tools for planning and understanding. They are not tax preparation software, they do not file anything, and they are not a substitute for professional advice. Tax outcomes depend on the full picture of your circumstances, and plenty of that picture is not captured by any calculator.

Read the methodology for how figures are verified, sources for the full citation list, and the disclaimer for the limits of what is offered here.