Are Social Security Benefits Taxed in 2026? The 85 Percent Worksheet

The question is not whether Social Security is taxed. It is whether your other income is large enough to drag part of it into taxable income, and how much of it lands there once it does. That computation is a worksheet rather than a rate, and it has three properties that surprise almost everyone who reads it for the first time.

1. It counts your income before the deduction you take. The standard deduction and itemizing both sit below this line, so neither one shelters a dollar of your benefits.
2. It adds back income that is not taxed anywhere else on the return, including tax-exempt municipal bond interest.
3. Its thresholds are fixed by statute and are not indexed, while benefits get a cost-of-living increase almost every year. The same $25,000 that decided the question in 2015 decides it in 2026, and it sits against a bigger benefit check every year it does not move.

How much of your Social Security benefits are taxable in 2026?

Two amounts and a ceiling decide it. The first is the base amount on line 8 of the worksheet: $25,000 if you are single, a head of household, a qualifying surviving spouse or married filing separately and lived apart from your spouse for the whole year, and $32,000 on a joint return. If the number the worksheet builds (its line 7, what most articles call your provisional income) is at or below that, you stop: the worksheet prints the words No. None of your social security benefits are taxable. Enter -0- on Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 6b. Below the second amount, up to half of your benefits can be taxed; above it, up to 85 percent can be.

Publication 915 states the ceiling the same way: “Generally, up to 50% of your benefits will be taxable. However, up to 85% of your benefits can be taxable if either of the following situations applies to you”, and the two situations it then lists are that “The total of one-half of your benefits and all your other income is more than $34,000 ($44,000 if you are married filing jointly)” or that “You are married filing separately and lived with your spouse at any time during 2025”. Those two figures are simply the base amount plus the line 10 amount, and they are the numbers that decide whether a raise, a part-time shift or a Roth conversion is more expensive than it looks.

Filing status	Base amount, line 8	Where the 85 percent tier starts, line 9 plus line 10	Most of your benefits that can ever be taxed
Single	$25,000	$34,000	85 percent
Head of household	$25,000	$34,000	85 percent
Qualifying surviving spouse	$25,000	$34,000	85 percent
Married filing jointly	$32,000	$44,000	85 percent
Married filing separately, lived apart from your spouse all year	$25,000	$34,000	85 percent
Married filing separately, lived with your spouse at any time	$0	$0	85 percent

The second row of that table is where most of the money is. Line 11 is the income above the second threshold, and line 15 taxes it at 85 percent of a benefit, so a filer deep in that tier has 85 cents of every further dollar of income pulled into taxable benefits before the rate schedule is consulted at all. There is a hard stop: line 17 caps the answer at 85 percent of everything you received, and line 18 takes the smaller of the two. For the $24,000 of benefits a single filer receives in the example below, that ceiling is $20,400, and it is first reached at $52,706 of provisional income.

The worksheet, line by line

Here is the actual worksheet, with the numbers from the default year in the panel above it: a single filer of 65 or older with $24,000 of net benefits, a $20,000 taxable pension, $600 of taxable interest and $1,000 of adjustments. The middle column is what the IRS prints, and the right column is what this engine computes for that year.

Line	What the 2025 Instructions for Form 1040 tell you to do	For this year
1	Enter the total amount from box 5 of all your Forms SSA-1099 and RRB-1099 Also enter this amount on Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 6a.	$24,000
2	Multiply line 1 by 50% (0.50).	$12,000
3	Combine the amounts from Form 1040 or 1040-SR, lines 1z, 2b, 3b, 4b, 5b, 7a, and 8.	$18,600
4	Enter the amount, if any, from Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 2a.	$0
5	Combine lines 2, 3, and 4.	$30,600
6	Enter the total of the amounts from Schedule 1, lines 11 through 20, and 23 and 25.	$1,000
7	Is the amount on line 6 less than the amount on line 5? Yes. Subtract line 6 from line 5.	$29,600
8	If you are: Married filing jointly, enter $32,000 Single, head of household, qualifying surviving spouse, or married filing separately and you lived apart from your spouse for all of 2025, enter $25,000.	$25,000
9	Is the amount on line 8 less than the amount on line 7? Yes. Subtract line 8 from line 7.	$4,600
10	Enter $12,000 if married filing jointly; $9,000 if single, head of household, qualifying surviving spouse, or married filing separately and you lived apart from your spouse for all of 2025.	$9,000
11	Subtract line 10 from line 9. If zero or less, enter -0-.	$0
12	Enter the smaller of line 9 or line 10.	$4,600
13	Enter one-half of line 12.	$2,300
14	Enter the smaller of line 2 or line 13.	$2,300
15	Multiply line 11 by 85% (0.85). If line 11 is zero, enter -0-.	$0
16	Add lines 14 and 15.	$2,300
17	Multiply line 1 by 85% (0.85).	$20,400
18	Taxable social security benefits. Enter the smaller of line 16 or line 17 Also enter this amount on Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 6b.	$2,300

Read the two lines that do the most work. Line 3 is where your other income enters, and it is “Combine the amounts from Form 1040 or 1040-SR, lines 1z, 2b, 3b, 4b, 5b, 7a, and 8”: wages, taxable interest, ordinary dividends, IRA distributions, pensions and annuities, capital gain and the other income on Schedule 1, all of them at the amount the return shows before any deduction is subtracted. Line 6 is the one thing that does reduce this figure: “Enter the total of the amounts from Schedule 1, lines 11 through 20, and 23 and 25”, which is the adjustments section of the return, a deductible IRA contribution, the health savings account deduction, student loan interest, and the rest of that list. Then comes the gate: “Is the amount on line 6 less than the amount on line 5?” If it is not, the worksheet is over and the benefits are untaxed.

Line 4 is the line people argue about. It takes Form 1040 line 2a, which is tax-exempt interest, municipal bond interest that the return does not tax anywhere else. The worksheet adds it back anyway, so a $8,000 coupon clip of exempt interest on a single return moves the provisional income figure up by the full $8,000 and can be the difference between $0 and $2,300 of taxable benefits. Publication 915 is blunt about the box 5 figure too: “Don’t reduce the amount of net social security benefits (box 5) by any of the items listed below. Use the amount in box 5 to figure taxable social security”, and the item listed first under that tip is “If you have Medicare premiums deducted from your benefits, this is the amount withheld during 2025”. Your Part B premium comes out of the check and stays inside the number the worksheet starts from.

Three examples the IRS prints, run through this engine

Publication 915 works a single filer with $5,980 of net benefits and $28,990 of taxable pension, and states the answer the same way the return does: “On line 6a of your Form 1040, you enter your net benefits of $5,980. On line 6b, you enter your taxable benefits of $2,990”. This engine reaches the same $2,990 by the same route, one line at a time: line 7 $31,980, line 9 $6,980, line 13 half of that at $3,490, and line 14 taking the smaller of that and half of the benefits, which is $2,990. It sits under the publication’s own sentence that “If part of your benefits are taxable, how much is taxable depends on the total amount of your benefits and other income”, which is exactly why no article can quote one fixed dollar answer for this question.

The publication’s joint example is a couple with $10,000 of benefits, $38,000 of taxable pension and $2,500 of interest, where it points out that “the income on line 8 of the worksheet ($45,500) is more than $44,000”. Follow the same year through the 1040 numbering and line 7 is $45,500, $13,500 of it is above the base amount, $1,500 is above the second threshold, line 14 contributes $5,000 and line 15 another $1,275, so line 18 prints $6,275 of taxable benefits. That is the published answer, and it is the shape of the second tier in one year: most of the tax here comes from the 85 percent slice, not from the pension’s own rate.

The third case is the one nobody expects. A married filer who lived with their spouse at any time in the year does not get a threshold at all. The instructions are explicit: “Married filing separately and you lived with your spouse at any time in 2025, skip lines 8 through 15; multiply line 7 by 85% (0.85) and enter the result on line 16”. With $10,000 of benefits and $8,000 of wages, line 7 is $13,000, line 16 would be $11,050, and line 17 caps the answer at $8,500 of taxable benefits. That status is always in the 85 percent tier and always against the ceiling, whatever the income.

Why a raise costs more than its own tax rate

Because line 11 and line 9 both grow with your other income, an extra dollar of wages does two jobs: it is taxed itself, and it pulls part of a benefit in after it. In the first tier the pull is 50 cents per dollar; in the second it is 85 cents. So a dollar of wages in the second tier adds 85.0 percent of taxable benefit on top of itself, and the tax on the pair is what the panel’s last two rows print.

The year	Provisional income	Taxable benefits	Tax	Cost of 1,000 dollars more in wages	That works out to
Single, benefits of 24,000 with a small private pension	$20,000	$0	$0	$0	0.0 percent
Single, benefits of 24,000 with a pension of 20,000	$32,000	$3,500	$740	$150	15.0 percent
Single, benefits of 24,000 with a pension of 30,000	$42,000	$11,300	$2,776	$222	22.2 percent
Joint, benefits of 30,000 and other income of 25,000	$40,000	$4,000	$0	$0	0.0 percent
Joint, benefits of 30,000 and other income of 40,000	$55,000	$15,350	$2,315	$189	18.9 percent
Single, benefits of 40,000 and other income of 120,000	$140,000	$34,000	$25,694	$240	24.0 percent
Separate, lived together, benefits of 20,000 and wages of 5,000	$15,000	$12,750	$165	$185	18.5 percent

The three rows that cost nothing are as instructive as the expensive ones. A single filer with $24,000 of benefits and $8,000 of other income sits at $20,000 of provisional income, which is under the $25,000 base amount, so a part-time job worth $1,000 costs $0: the answer is genuinely zero until the base amount is crossed. Then the cost jumps: the same filer with $20,000 of pension is $2,000 of provisional income away from the second tier, and the extra $1,000 costs $150, which is 15.0 percent of it. Once past $34,000, the same $1,000 costs $222 on $30,000 of pension, because now the wage is taxed at 12 percent and it carries $850 of benefit with it.

On a joint return the effect is milder at the bottom and worse at the top, mostly because the thresholds are 28 percent higher while two benefit checks and two pensions are usually not. $30,000 of benefits with $25,000 of other income puts the couple at $40,000 of provisional income and $4,000 of taxable benefits, and they pay $0 of tax, because the standard deduction of $32,200 swallows the whole thing. Add $1,000 and they still pay $0: when taxable income is already zero, a raise is free until the deduction is used up.

The last row of that table is the other edge of the same rule. With $40,000 of benefits and $120,000 of other income, line 16 would reach $94,600, but line 17 caps the answer at 85 percent of everything received, so line 18 stops at $34,000. Above $68,706 of provisional income a further dollar of wages no longer drags any benefit with it and is taxed only at its own rate. That is the one place on this worksheet where being higher up is cheaper per dollar than being a little lower.

What the new 2026 deductions do not do here

2026 is the first year with the deductions for tip income, overtime pay and seniors, all of which look like they should lower the amount of your benefits that gets taxed. They do not touch this worksheet. Line 6 of the worksheet is written as “Enter the total of the amounts from Schedule 1, lines 11 through 20, and 23 and 25”, and all three of the new deductions are claimed on Schedule 1-A instead, which the worksheet never reads. A filer who is 65 or older and takes the $6,000 senior deduction, or a server over 62 who deducts qualified tips, gets a lower taxable income at the bottom of the return and exactly the same taxable benefits at line 18. The one exception is an amount that is itself an adjustment on Schedule 1 in that line range, and the new deductions are not those.

Two other things that lower your tax and do not lower this line: the qualified dividends and long term capital gains in a brokerage portfolio get their own lower rates on the return, but the amounts on Form 1040 lines 3b and 7a enter line 3 of this worksheet at full value, so drawing on a portfolio in a year you also take benefits is more expensive than the dividend rate suggests. And the enhanced deduction for seniors is a fixed $6,000 per person on the return rather than an adjustment, so it does the same job for the tax and none for the benefits.

Do these thresholds change with inflation?

No, and the documents show it rather than say it. The four amounts in the worksheet are $25,000 and $32,000 on line 8, $9,000 and $12,000 on line 10. Publication 915 printed exactly those four numbers for 2015 (retrieved 15 October 2026) and again for 2020 and again for 2025. Rev. Proc. 2025-32, the document that publishes every inflation-linked figure for 2026 (the rate tables, the standard deduction, the additional deduction for age or blindness, the dependent ceiling) never mentions the section 86 amounts at all. Meanwhile, benefits are indexed: the cost-of-living increase lifts the check in most years, and Publication 915’s own box 5 figures move with it. A threshold that stays still under an income that grows is how a worksheet that used to touch nobody ends up touching a lot of people.

When you cannot use this worksheet

Four cases send you somewhere else, and the panel says so in its own fine print.

• You repaid more benefits than you received. Publication 915: “Don’t use this worksheet if you repaid benefits in 2025 and your total repayments (box 4 of Forms SSA-1099 and RRB-1099) were more than your gross benefits for 2025 (box 3 of Forms SSA-1099 and RRB-1099). None of your benefits are taxable for 2025.” Enter the benefits on line 6a and nothing on line 6b, and read the repayment rules instead.
• You have an exclusion of a particular kind. Adoption benefits on Form 8839, foreign earned income or housing on Form 2555, income as a bona fide resident of American Samoa or Puerto Rico on Form 4563, or savings bond interest excluded on Form 8815. For those the instructions say “you must use Worksheet 1 in this publication to figure your taxable benefits”, because that version carries an extra line for the exclusions this one does not have.
• A lump-sum payment for an earlier year. “If any of your benefits are taxable for 2025 and they include a lump-sum benefit payment that was for an earlier year, you may be able to reduce the taxable amount”, by electing on the return line and using the lump-sum worksheets in Publication 915. That election can change the answer by hundreds of dollars, and no calculator that does not model it can tell you.
• You are a 1983 or earlier beneficiary. Benefits for months before December 1983 are not taxable no matter when they are paid, and a lump-sum death payment is never taxable.

How to report the number, and how to prepay it

Line 6a of Form 1040 gets the total from box 5 of every SSA-1099 and RRB-1099 you received, whether or not any of it is taxable; line 6b gets the taxable part, and the instructions are explicit that when the answer is none you still report the benefits on 6a and enter -0- on line 6b. If you are married filing separately and lived apart from your spouse for the whole year, the box on line 6d has to be checked, or the return will not match what the IRS has.

Then the practical part. Benefit payers do not withhold by default, so the tax on a taxable benefit is usually caught in April unless you ask for it. Form W-4V lets you pick a flat rate: “you may choose to have the payer withhold federal income tax of 7%, 10%, 12%, or 22% from each payment, but no other percentage or amount”. Run the panel first and take the tax line it prints; if it is more than you would owe anyway, the 7 percent box is usually the right one, and the $160 figure for a year with untaxed benefits is the case where you should withhold nothing at all. If you have a part-time job in the same year, the estimated tax dates page is the other half of the answer.

Common questions

At what income do Social Security benefits become taxable in 2026?

At $25,000 of provisional income if you file single, head of household or as a qualifying surviving spouse, and $32,000 on a joint return. Provisional income is not the same as the income on the front of the return: it is half of your benefits plus all of your other income including tax-exempt interest, less the adjustments on Schedule 1. Someone with a $12,000 benefit check and nothing else has $6,000 of provisional income and owes nothing; the same person with a $20,000 pension has $32,000 and pays tax on $3,500 of the benefits.

Why is 85 percent of my Social Security taxable?

Because line 11 came out above zero. Once provisional income passes the second threshold ($34,000 single, $44,000 joint), the worksheet taxes 85 percent of the amount above it and adds it to whatever the first tier already pulled in. It is still capped by line 17, so 85 percent of your benefits is the most that can ever be taxed, and the panel prints the provisional income where that ceiling arrives: $52,706 for $24,000 of benefits.

Does the standard deduction reduce my taxable Social Security?

No. Line 3 of the worksheet takes the return’s income lines before the deduction, and nothing in the worksheet reads line 12 of the return. Itemizing does not help either. What the deduction does change is the tax at the bottom: on the default year the $18,150 standard deduction (the $16,100 for a single filer plus $2,050 for the age 65 box that is ticked by default) takes $19,900 of adjusted gross income down to $1,750 of taxable income, which is why the tax is $175 rather than the $1,990 a flat 10 percent on everything would suggest.

Are Social Security thresholds indexed for inflation?

Not these. See the section above: the same four amounts appear in the IRS’s 2015, 2020 and 2025 printings of Publication 915, and the 2026 inflation procedure does not list them.

Is my Medicare premium taxed?

It is not a separate item at all, and it does not reduce the income figure. Part B is withheld from your check, and Publication 915 tells you to use box 5 as printed rather than subtract the premium. The premium you paid is a medical expense on Schedule A if you itemize, subject to the floor on that schedule, which is the only place it comes back.

Do I file a return if Social Security is my only income?

Usually not, because none of it is taxable and a return with no taxable income is generally not required. But the worksheet is not the filing test: Publication 915’s own example is a single filer with $1,500 of benefits, $17,000 of pension and $700 of interest whose benefits were untaxed and who still had to file, because “Even though none of your benefits are taxable, you must file a return for 2025 because your taxable gross income ($18,450) exceeds the minimum filing requirement amount for your filing status”.

Can I have tax taken out of my benefits?

Yes, at 7, 10, 12 or 22 percent and nothing in between, by filing Form W-4V with the benefit payer rather than with the IRS. Use the tax line from the panel to choose between them: if the panel says $740, the 7 percent box on $24,000 of benefits is roughly $1,680 and you will owe the difference; if it says $2,776, you want 12.

Is railroad retirement taxed the same way?

The tier 1 portion of a Form RRB-1099 is treated as a Social Security benefit and goes through this same worksheet; the occupational annuity portion (tier 2) is taxed like a pension and belongs on line 3 as other income rather than inside the box 5 figure. That is why a retired railroad worker can end up with more income counted here than a person with the same check from Social Security.

Does a state tax my Social Security benefits?

Some do and most do not, and the answer changes the size of the bill more than a tier of this worksheet does. The federal figure the panel prints is only half of what a retiree in a taxing state actually pays.

Sources

• Instructions for Form 1040, the Social Security Benefits Worksheet for lines 6a and 6b: the eighteen lines this panel runs, the base amounts on line 8, the second threshold on line 10 and the married filing separately rule that skips to line 16
• Publication 915, Social Security and Equivalent Railroad Retirement Benefits: the 50 percent and 85 percent rule, the filing and reporting instructions, the box 5 rule about Medicare premiums, and the three worked examples this engine is asserted against
• Rev. Proc. 2025-32 (Internal Revenue Service): the 2026 rate tables, the 2026 standard deduction and the additional deduction for age or blindness used on the bottom half of the panel. It does not adjust the section 86 amounts, which is why the thresholds on this page are the same as the worksheet’s
• Publication 915, 2015 edition: the same four dollar amounts, eleven years before 2026, which is what an amount that is not indexed for inflation looks like on a form
• Publication 915, 2020 edition: the same four dollar amounts again, six years before 2026
• Schedule 1-A (Form 1040), Additional Deductions for Tip Income, Overtime and Seniors: where the three new 2026 deductions are actually claimed, which is not the schedule the worksheet’s line 6 reads
• Form W-4V, Voluntary Withholding Request: the four withholding rates a benefit payer is allowed to apply, and the sentence that no other percentage or amount is allowed

Next step: Run this year through the panel, then run it a second time with the part-time job, the IRA withdrawal or the house sale you are deciding on in the extra income box. The gap between the two tax lines is the price of that money, and on the second tier it is higher than the bracket suggests.