What is the difference between marginal and effective tax rate?

Your marginal rate is the rate applied to your next unit of income — the band your income tops out in. Your effective rate is total tax divided by total income, which is always lower in a progressive system because earlier bands were taxed more lightly. This tool shows both side by side.

Does moving into a higher tax bracket reduce my take-home pay?

No. In a marginal (progressive) system only the income above each threshold is taxed at the higher rate, so a pay rise is never taxed retroactively. Crossing a bracket can never leave you with less money — the visualizer makes this obvious by colouring each band separately.

How is the tax calculated for each band?

For every band the tool finds how much of your income falls between that band lower bound and the next bound (or your income, for the top band), then multiplies that slice by the band rate. Summing across bands gives total tax. The top band that contains your income sets the marginal rate.

Can I use this for any country or my own custom schedule?

Yes. Presets for UK and US federal are starting points, but you can add, edit or remove any band and change the currency, so it models any flat or progressive schedule. It treats every table as a marginal schedule — each rate applies only to income within its band.

Does this include allowances, deductions, or social security?

No. It models the bracket schedule you enter against the income you enter, which is treated as already-taxable. Subtract personal allowances, the standard deduction, pension contributions or pre-tax items first, and add separate charges like National Insurance or FICA yourself.

Is my income data sent anywhere?

No. Every calculation runs in your browser with JavaScript, and your inputs are saved only in this browser via local storage. Nothing is uploaded, and you can reset or clear it any time.

Tax Bracket Visualizer

A tax bracket visualizer that turns an abstract marginal schedule into a picture: enter your income and a bracket table, and it shows exactly how much tax each band contributes, what your marginal and effective rates are, and how your income splits into tax versus take-home on a stacked bar. It is built for anyone trying to understand a payslip, compare a job offer across brackets, sanity-check an accountant’s number, or simply settle the perennial argument about whether a pay rise can ever leave you worse off.

Most tax explainers stop at a single number. The problem is that one number hides the mechanics: people routinely believe that crossing into a higher band re-taxes all their income, or confuse the headline marginal rate with what they actually pay. This tool draws each band in its own colour so you can see the slices add up, and it always reports the effective rate alongside the marginal one so the gap between them is impossible to miss.

How it works

The calculator treats your table as a marginal schedule. Each row is the lower bound of a band plus the rate that applies to income inside that band. For each band it works out the portion of your income that sits between that band start and the next band start (or, for the top band, your income), multiplies that slice by the band rate, and adds the result to your total tax. The band that contains the top of your income sets your marginal rate; total tax divided by total income gives your effective rate. Bands you have not reached are dimmed, and only bands carrying income appear in the chart. Everything recomputes instantly as you edit, and your inputs persist in this browser so your scenario is still there when you come back.

Example

Take a 60000 income against the UK 2024/25 preset: the first 12570 is taxed at 0%, the slice from 12570 to 50270 at 20%, and the slice from 50270 to 60000 at 40%. That comes to roughly 11432 in tax. Your marginal rate is 40% — the rate on your next pound — but your effective rate is about 19%, because most of your income was taxed in the lower bands. A 1000 pay rise therefore costs 400 in tax, not 40% of everything you earn. Load the US federal preset, switch the currency to USD, and the same logic produces an entirely different curve you can read off the same bar.

Use the Export breakdown CSV button to pull every band, its tax contribution, and your headline rates into a spreadsheet for budgeting or comparison.