2026 self-employment tax calculator

The rate is 15.3 percent, made of 12.4 percent for social security and 2.9 percent for Medicare, and the IRS states it plainly on its self-employment tax page.

It does not apply to your whole profit. It applies to 92.35 percent of it, which is the figure Form 1040-ES tells you to use when you estimate your net earnings from self-employment. On a 60,000 dollar profit that is 55,410 dollars of net earnings and 8,477.73 dollars of self-employment tax.

The 12.4 percent social security half stops once your wages plus net earnings reach 184,500 dollars for 2026. The 2.9 percent Medicare half never stops, and an extra 0.9 percent starts above 200,000 dollars if you are single or 250,000 dollars if you are married filing jointly.

The federal system expects the money as you earn it. If you expect to owe 1,000 dollars or more when you file, the IRS estimated taxes page says you should be making payments during the year.

Waiting until April does not just delay the bill, it adds an underpayment penalty that is calculated as interest running from each date you were short. That is why paying late is still better than paying later: the clock stops when the money arrives.

April 15, 2026, June 15, 2026, September 15, 2026 and January 15, 2027. They are printed on page 4 of Form 1040-ES.

The periods behind them are not equal quarters, which surprises people. The first payment covers January through March, the second covers April and May only, the third covers June through August, and the fourth covers September through December.

You can skip the January 15, 2027 payment if you file your 2026 return by February 1, 2027 and pay the whole balance with it.

It is the amount that makes the underpayment penalty go away even if your estimate turns out low. Form 1040-ES sets it as the smaller of 90 percent of the tax on your 2026 return or 100 percent of the tax shown on your 2025 return.

If your 2025 adjusted gross income was over 150,000 dollars, or 75,000 dollars if you are married filing separately in 2026, the prior-year figure becomes 110 percent instead of 100 percent.

The prior-year route is the useful one for a good year, because it is a number you already know on the day you file.

No. It is federal only, and for most people state and local income tax add a real amount on top. A handful of states have no income tax at all and a handful have city tax as well, so there is no honest single number to add here.

Check your own state revenue department, and treat the figure on this page as the federal floor rather than the whole bill.

Because it comes off the profit that two different taxes are calculated from. A hundred dollars of proven expense removes 92.35 dollars from the base of the 15.3 percent self-employment tax and it also removes about a hundred dollars from your taxable income before the income tax rate touches it.

Put a number into the box under the results and the calculator runs the whole model twice, once with the expense and once without, and shows you the exact difference rather than a rule of thumb.

Section 199A lets many sole proprietors deduct 20 percent of their qualified business income before the income tax rate is applied. Recent legislation made it permanent and, from 2026, added a minimum deduction of 400 dollars when you have at least 1,000 dollars of qualified business income.

The limits that complicate it start above 201,750 dollars of taxable income, or 403,500 dollars for married filing jointly, according to Revenue Procedure 2025-32. Below those thresholds it is a straight 20 percent, which is what this calculator applies. Above them, talk to a tax professional.

No, and the way to be sure is not to believe us. Open your browser network tab, fill the whole thing in, and watch: nothing is sent. There is no analytics tag on this page, no cookie and no third-party script.

The calculation runs in JavaScript on your own machine. Close the tab and the numbers are gone. If you want to keep them, use the save button under the results, which produces a PDF on your device without sending anything either.

No. It is an estimate built from the published 2026 federal figures, and every one of them is linked to the IRS document it came from so you can check it.

It assumes a sole proprietor filing Schedule C and Schedule SE, with no capital gains, no dependants, no credits and no state tax. Your return will have things in it that this page has never heard of. Use a tax professional for the return.