About this site

Why it exists

Working for yourself turns a handful of questions that employees never think about into recurring problems. How much of this payment is actually mine. What should I be charging. Is this project worth taking. The arithmetic behind each question is not complicated, but it is tedious, easy to get wrong, and scattered across tax publications written for accountants rather than for the person doing the work.

Every tool here does one calculation and shows its working. There is no account, no email capture, and no upsell to a paid tier.

How the calculators work

Everything runs as JavaScript in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted, logged, or stored. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the calculators will keep working, which is a reasonable thing to want from something you are typing your income into.

Where the tax figures come from

Tax constants are taken from IRS publications and the Social Security Administration contribution and benefit base: the wage base limit, standard deductions, marginal bracket thresholds, and the standard mileage rate. These change annually, usually announced in the autumn for the following year, and are reviewed each January.

Head-of-household bracket thresholds are the one set carrying more uncertainty than the others and should be confirmed against the current revenue procedure if a decision turns on them.

What this site is not

It is not tax advice, and it is not a substitute for a professional who knows your circumstances. The calculators handle common federal situations. They do not model state or local tax, business entity elections, credits, phase-outs, international income, or the many legitimate complications that make real returns harder than a formula.

Use the output to plan, to compare options, and to walk into a conversation with an accountant already knowing roughly what you are looking at. Do not use it as the basis for a filing.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong or a calculator behaves oddly, that is worth knowing about. Reports of errors are read and acted on — see the contact page.