Raise Impact Calculator (After Tax)
Your raise
Federal taxes only — state tax varies too much to fake. Everything else is exact 2026 math.
How we calculate this
We compute your federal tax at the new salary and at the old salary — using the actual 2026 brackets and standard deduction — and take the difference. That incremental method is exact even when your raise straddles a bracket line, which is where flat "multiply by your marginal rate" estimates go wrong.
No, a raise can't lower your take-home. Brackets are marginal: only the dollars above a bracket line pay the higher rate. Crossing into the 22% bracket doesn't tax your whole salary at 22% — it taxes the slice that crossed. Anyone who tells you to refuse a raise for tax reasons is doing the math wrong.
The wage-base quirk works in your favor: wages above $184,500 (the 2026 Social Security base) don't pay the 6.2% SS tax. If a raise carries you across that line, the dollars above it keep more per dollar than the ones below — one of the few places in the tax code where earning more gets cheaper.
Federal only. State income tax varies from 0% to 13%+, so we don't fake it. The 0.9% Additional Medicare surtax above $200k/$250k and changes to your 401(k) contributions aren't modeled either — all flagged in the assumptions panel.
Real scenarios
A $10k raise straddling the 22% line
Going from $60,000 to $70,000 single pushes taxable income across the 22% bracket line. Naive math says you lose $2,200 to federal tax; the real answer is $1,550, because part of the raise is still taxed at 12%. With FICA's $765, you keep $7,685 — 76.9% of the raise, about $640/mo.
Crossing the Social Security wage base
A $15,000 raise from $180,000 to $195,000 crosses the $184,500 base. Only the first $4,500 pays Social Security tax; the rest skips it entirely. Net: $10,903 kept — a 72.7% keep rate that would have been lower if the whole raise sat under the base.
The promotion myth, retired
From $200,000 to $220,000, the raise crosses into the 32% bracket — and you still keep $14,740 of $20,000. Every scenario on this page keeps at least 70 cents of each raise dollar (before state tax). The raise is always worth taking; the only question is what you do with it.