IRS releases inflation-adjustments for next year's taxes
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The Internal Revenue Service released inflation-adjusted tax brackets for next year on Tuesday. The changes could boost your paycheck in 2023.
Why it matters: Cost of living adjustments like these, and recent ones for Social Security payments, are now crucial in an era of soaring inflation.
Details: The standard deduction for married couples filing jointly in 2023 is $27,700, up $1,800 from the prior year.
- For single taxpayers, the standard deduction rises rose to $13,850, up $900.
- While tax rates remain the same, the income limits for each tax rate are different.
- That means your top tax rate might have gone down. For example, if you were earning $90,000 a year in 2022 your top tax rate was 24%. Next year it's 22%.
Zoom out: The IRS adjusts tax brackets every year to ward off "bracket creep" — when your salary rises to keep up with inflation, propelling you into a higher tax bracket.
- This is easy to understand if you go back and look at salaries from decades ago. Say the IRS tax brackets were still set at a 1980 level, then someone earning $34,000 a year — a tidy sum at the time — would face a 49% tax rate. That would be considered extremely regressive in 2022.
- Congress codified the annual inflation adjustments as part of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981; they went into effect in 1985. Before then, a period when inflation was high, brackets weren't adjusted.
Go deeper:
How inflation can lower your taxes
The new income tax brackets for 2023
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to state that for $90,000 in earnings, the tax rate is 24% in 2022, and 22% in 2023 (not 32% and 24%, respectively).
