2027 tax brackets and standard deduction: the projection

The short answer. The 2026 federal tax brackets and standard deduction are confirmed, and the seven marginal rates of 10% through 37% are now permanent. Only the dollar thresholds and the standard deduction move each year, adjusted by a slow-moving inflation measure. The 2027 figures are not yet official; the Internal Revenue Service sets them in a Revenue Procedure released around October 2026, and everything below for that year is a clearly-labeled projection.

The rates are fixed; only the thresholds move

The most important thing to understand about any future tax year is what actually changes and what does not. The seven marginal rates — 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37% — were made permanent by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), specifically Section 70101, which amended Internal Revenue Code section 1(j). That permanence removes the cliff that used to loom at the end of each temporary rate schedule. So when someone asks what the 2027 rates will be, the honest answer is that they will be the same seven rates we have today. What moves from year to year is the income level at which each rate kicks in, along with the standard deduction that shields the first slice of income from tax entirely. Building the income those brackets apply to — your adjusted gross income (AGI), assembled from your W-2 and other sources — is the necessary first step before any bracket math means anything.

The confirmed 2026 figures

For 2026 the numbers are settled, published by the Internal Revenue Service in Revenue Procedure 2025-32. The standard deduction is $32,200 for married couples filing jointly, $16,100 for single filers and for married taxpayers filing separately, and $24,150 for heads of household. Those amounts are the baseline from which any 2027 projection has to be built, so it is worth anchoring on them.

The bracket thresholds for 2026 are likewise confirmed. The table below shows where each rate begins for single filers and for married couples filing jointly:

Rate	Single — begins at	Married filing jointly — begins at
10%	first dollar (up to $12,400)	first dollar (up to $24,800)
22%	over $50,400	over $100,800
24%	over $105,700	over $211,400
32%	over $201,775	over $403,550
37%	over $640,600	over $768,700

The 12% band fills the gap between the top of the 10% bracket and the start of the 22% bracket, and the 35% band sits between the 32% and 37% thresholds. Those two intermediate breakpoints are not reproduced here because precision matters more than completeness; the figures above are the ones the Internal Revenue Service has confirmed. Note, too, that these are the brackets for ordinary income. Long-term investment profits ride on a separate set of capital-gains brackets with their own thresholds, which is a common and costly source of confusion.

How the annual inflation bump works

The mechanism that carries 2026 into 2027 is written into Internal Revenue Code section 1(f)(3). Each year the thresholds and the standard deduction are adjusted by the chained Consumer Price Index (C-CPI-U), and then rounded — the standard deduction to the nearest $50. The word “chained” is doing real work here. The chained index assumes that as prices rise, people substitute toward cheaper goods, so it climbs more slowly than the traditional Consumer Price Index that governed indexing in earlier decades. The practical effect is that the annual increases are modest. Brackets and the standard deduction creep upward rather than leap, which is precisely why a projection from a confirmed base is reasonable even though it is not official.

What 2027 might look like — clearly a projection

With the mechanism in hand we can sketch 2027, provided the label “estimate” stays attached at every step. Suppose inflation, as measured by the chained index, runs roughly 2.5% — an illustrative assumption, not a forecast. Apply that to the confirmed 2026 married-filing-jointly standard deduction of $32,200 and you land near $33,000 after rounding to the nearest $50. The same arithmetic, applied to the single-filer standard deduction of $16,100, points to something in the neighborhood of $16,500, and the head-of-household figure of $24,150 would rise toward roughly $24,750. The bracket thresholds would shift upward by a similar small percentage, so the point at which a single filer crosses into the 22% rate, confirmed at over $50,400 for 2026, would nudge up by a few hundred dollars rather than jump.

Every one of those 2027 numbers is a projection built on a stated 2.5% assumption, and the real adjustment factor will not match it exactly. The Internal Revenue Service uses a specific twelve-month average of the chained index, not a round number pulled from a headline, and the official figures can land above or below any back-of-the-envelope estimate. Treat the projections as a planning range, not a promise. For the parallel projection on the wealth-transfer side, see the 2027 estate and gift tax exemption projection, which OBBBA made permanent at $15 million per person.

When the official numbers arrive — and what to do now

The official 2027 brackets and standard deduction are set by the Internal Revenue Service in a Revenue Procedure released around October 2026, and this page will be updated the moment those figures are published. Until then, the actionable takeaway is the part that is already certain: the seven rates are permanent, the thresholds and standard deduction are indexed each year by the slow-moving chained Consumer Price Index, and the confirmed 2026 figures above are the firm ground you should plan from. The modest size of the annual bump means your 2026 marginal rate is a reliable guide to where you will likely sit in 2027 unless your income changes materially.

That stability also sharpens one recurring decision. Because the standard deduction rises a little each year, the bar your itemizable expenses must clear to be worth the trouble rises with it — so the question of whether to take the standard deduction or itemize is worth revisiting annually rather than assuming last year’s answer still holds. Check back here in the fall; we will swap every projected 2027 figure for the confirmed one as soon as the Internal Revenue Service makes it official.