Methodology

Sources for 2026 amounts

Ordinary tax tables, standard deduction amounts, additional amounts for age or blindness, long-term capital-gain and qualified-dividend caps, the Child Tax Credit maximum of $2,200, the $1,700 additional-credit figure, and the Earned Income Credit table including the $12,200 investment-income limit are taken from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, issued with news release IR-2025-103 on 9 October 2025. We re-checked those documents on 12 November 2026. The Child Tax Credit phase-out thresholds of $200,000 and $400,000 of modified AGI, and the $50-per-$1,000 (or fraction) reduction, come from section 24(h) of the Internal Revenue Code, which the 2025 Act made permanent. Refund-status and Free File descriptions come from the live IRS pages cited on those guides, checked the same day.

We do not invent search volumes, CPC figures, or unpublished IRS amounts. If Congress or the IRS later changes a 2026 figure, the official page wins and this site should be updated. The revenue procedure itself says that later legislation may require additional guidance.

What the refund worksheet does

It adds wages, other ordinary income, long-term capital gains and qualified dividends, subtracts above-the-line adjustments, subtracts the larger of the 2026 standard deduction (with age and blindness add-ons) or a user-entered itemized total, then subtracts any other below-the-line amount the user entered. It taxes ordinary taxable income with the official “base plus percentage of excess” tables and taxes preferential income with a stacking method: 0% up to the official zero cap given ordinary income already used, 15% up to the official 15% cap, and 20% above that. It then applies the Child Tax Credit, the credit for other dependents and EITC, and compares net tax with withholding plus estimated payments.

Child Tax Credit: $2,200 per qualifying child and $500 per other dependent, reduced by $50 for each $1,000 or fraction of modified AGI over $200,000 ($400,000 joint), with the reduction applied to the Child Tax Credit first. Nonrefundable amounts offset income tax. The additional Child Tax Credit is the leftover Child Tax Credit, limited to $1,700 per qualifying child and to 15% of earned income over $2,500. The alternative Schedule 8812 formula for some families with three or more children is not run. EITC uses the official 2026 earned-income amounts and maxima, statutory phase-in rates, and a phase-out slope implied by the official completed-phaseout points. Married filing separately returns $0 EITC because the general rule disallows it; the separated-spouse exception is not modelled. Investment income over $12,200 returns $0.

What we omit, and how we test

The tools do not compute self-employment tax, Additional Medicare Tax, the Net Investment Income Tax, the alternative minimum tax, the premium tax credit, most other credits, state tax, or a complete Schedule D loss limitation. They do not apply qualifying-child, residency or Social Security-number tests. User-entered “other taxes” and “other credits” are included only as typed. All arithmetic runs in the browser; inputs are not uploaded to us.

Unit tests in the source repository check the rate tables against the printed bases in the revenue procedure, the standard-deduction figures, worked refund examples (including a single filer at $60,000 of wages with $5,020 of tax), Child Tax Credit and EITC plateau and phase-out cases, and preferential-rate stacking. A site build test checks canonical URLs, ads.txt, internal links and article counts. If a test and an official document disagree, the document is right and the test should be changed.

RefundTally is an independent publisher, not a tax preparer and not the IRS. Results are educational estimates. File through IRS Free File, other software or a qualified professional, and follow current official instructions.