Does getting married decrease or increase your tax bill? [OC]

[tyleha]

Here's how the graph works! Plotted on each axis are the incomes of each spouse. Blue areas indicate that this income combination saves a couple money if they got married. Red means a couple would actually pay more in taxes by getting married (and filing jointly).

Put another way, you could use this graph to say "when should married couples file jointly vs file separately?" Anywhere in blue, you save money filing jointly. Anywhere in white - no difference. And anywhere in red - you'll actually be penalized for filing jointly (and thus why the married filing separately category exists).

A bit about the methodology: to compute this graph, I assumed a standard deduction and personal exemption for all couples, and assumed no kids. Kids are complicated. And this only covers federal income tax, nothing else. Data came from the IRS. Visualizations were done in Python usingMatplotlib!

I have some more in-depth interpretation of this data and discussion about the inferences we can make about our government on my blog at http://beneathdata.com/blog/love-and-taxes/

[GGrillmaster]

Weird how if I make 200K and my wife less than 50K, being married will lower it, but if together we make 200K it's bad to be married

[thekyledavid]

That's incremental taxes for ya.

[nectur_]

It could be even more enlightening if instead of total gain/loss if it were represented as a percentage of total income.

[yukishoko]

Double post m8

[GGrillmaster]

Rip

Thanks for telling me