Personal estimated tax payments calculator

If you run a C-Corp business, or file taxes as a C-Corp, you must pay personal taxes on your personal income. See how much, below.

How to calculate your personal income taxes

U.S. taxes are graduated, meaning you can’t just take your total income and multiply it by your effective tax rate, say “24%.” Pictured are the “brackets” you may fall into.

Tax brackets work like this: On the first $12,400 of income you report as a single filer, you pay 10%, or $1,240. On the next $12,400, you pay 12%, or $1,488. If you earned $24,800, you pay $2,728 total. The tax rate keeps climbing like that until the last bracket, where you pay 37%. 

The tax bracket that your total taxable income falls into is known as your “marginal” bracket. For example, “24%.” However, even that is not exactly what you’ll pay. As we explore next, how you file, the type of income you report, and any deductions you claim will change that total.

How personal income taxes work: The graduated tax calculator above gives you a sense of how much you are liable to pay on your taxable income. But what income is actually taxable? There are deductions you can apply, also known as “writeoffs”: Payments on your home mortgage, sales tax paid, charitable contributions, retirement contributions, home office, personal business expenses, and many more.

Plus, if any of the following are true for you, it complicates your tax situation further:

• Filing jointly. If you are married, you can opt to file independently or jointly. 
• Multiple income streams: If you have a W-2 job but also do 1099 contract work, you must calculate both separately, and carefully categorize the business expenses. 
• Freelance income: Freelancers must pay quarterly estimated taxes on freelance earnings, then pay whatever difference is left at tax time. But this is not true for your W-2 income.
• Diverse investments: If you own many classes of assets from crypto to shares in a fund, that adds complexity.
• Rental properties: Most people put their rental property under the cover of an LLC which means they must track the income and expenses like a business. The upside is they can deduct mortgage interest, property taxes, depreciation, and more.
• Foreign-earned income: You must report earnings from outside the U.S., partly because of anti-money laundering laws.

It’s almost always a good idea to hire a tax accountant to prepare your taxes. They know all the forms and rules. They can save you from underpayments and fines, but they can also save you from overpayments, which are just as bad. Any money you prepay on your taxes and then have to request back at tax time was a free loan you gave to the government. That’s capital you and your business could have been using for anything else.