Updates

Rate changes, new calculators, and improvements.

September 2026

Both housing allowance calculators were inventing their answers. The BAH calculator multiplied a made-up figure for each city by a made-up factor for each rank and took 20% off for members without dependents; the military pay calculator ignored location entirely and added 15% for dependents to a single figure per rank. Neither is how BAH is set, and the two gave different answers for the same service member. An E-5 with dependents in San Diego was shown $2,720 a month where the official 2026 rate is $3,975, and the page’s worked example claimed a third figure, $3,219; across the table the invented cells ran about 25% low on average, and 47% low for an E-5 without dependents in New York City. Both calculators now use the official 2026 Defense Travel Management Office rates for twelve large duty stations, read cell by cell for all 24 pay grades with and without dependents, from $1,806 for an E-5 with dependents at Fort Bragg to $5,127 in San Francisco. The military pay calculator gains a duty station choice, including on-base housing with no BAH, and both pages point to the DoD lookup for any other ZIP code.
The beam span calculator was recommending lumber the building code does not allow. It sized a beam from its span alone, using a table of floor joist spans, while the load and tributary width you typed in were multiplied into a total, displayed, and then ignored: with its defaults it put a single 2x10 across 12 feet, where the International Residential Code allows even a doubled 2x10 carrying one floor only 9'-2" in the narrowest building it covers. It has been rebuilt as a header and girder calculator on the code’s own span tables, R602.7(1) for exterior bearing walls and R602.7(2) for interior ones. You choose the wall type, what the wall carries, the ground snow load, the building width and whether the top of the member is braced, and it lists every built-up member the table allows with its maximum span and the jack studs needed at each end, interpolating between the 12, 24 and 36 foot widths as the code permits and sending anything wider than the tables to an engineer. The floor joist calculator had a quieter version of the same problem: one span per size, with no species and no load, and at 16 inches on center it passed a 2x10 at 16 feet and a 2x12 at 20 feet, both longer than the code allows in a living area (15'-5" and 17'-10" in spruce-pine-fir). It now reads the full R502.3.1 tables for the four common No. 2 species, separates living areas designed for 40 psf from bedrooms designed for 30 psf, adds 19.2-inch spacing and names the smallest size that passes. Every span was read cell by cell from the 2021 code and matches the 2018 and 2024 editions. The explanations, worked examples and FAQs were rewritten in both languages, and the beam page no longer describes engineering formulas the calculator never ran.
Three family-law and survivor calculators disagreed with the rules they cite. The child support calculator moved money the wrong way: when the children spent more than half their time with one parent, it raised that parent’s payment instead of the other parent’s, so the more custody you had, the more you were shown paying. It now works out who pays from the parenting-time split and applies New York’s Child Support Standards Act percentages — 17% for one child, 25% for two, 29% for three, 31% for four and 35% for five or more — in place of a 20%, 28%, 33% ladder that matched no state’s guideline; the worked example, which had guessed at roughly $850 a month, now runs the formula to $13,275 a year. The probate cost calculator charged a flat percentage of the estate by state plus a court fee of 0.5% capped at $2,000 that no state uses. California’s statutory attorney and executor fees are each 4% of the first $100,000, 3% of the next $100,000 and 2% of the next $800,000, with smaller percentages above that, and Florida, New York, Ohio and New Jersey publish schedules of their own; those five states are now calculated from their statutes, with California’s $435 and Florida’s $395 filing fees. A $750,000 California estate comes to $36,435 in the fees shown, where the page had said $23,435 and the calculator $32,000. The survivor benefit calculator capped a family at 165% of the worker’s benefit while its own text said 175% in one place and 150% to 180% in another. Social Security’s family maximum is a formula with its own bend points, $1,643, $2,371 and $3,093 in 2026; for a worker whose benefit was $2,500 it is $4,617.50, and that is now the figure the calculator applies and the example shows.
A second group of benefit and household calculators was running on superseded figures. Medicaid gave children a 200% income limit where the median state now covers them to about 255% of the poverty level, put parents in every non-expansion state at roughly half the poverty line when the real limits run from 15% in Texas to 105% in Tennessee, and gave childless adults in Georgia and Wisconsin no coverage at all although both cover them to 100%, Georgia through its Pathways program with a work requirement. The grocery budget calculator now uses the USDA food plan report for July 2026 — $59.13, $80.25 and $97.10 a week per person on the thrifty, moderate and liberal plans — so a family of four on the moderate plan budgets $1,390.89 a month. The WIC calculator presented invented monthly benefit amounts by participant type; it now shows the average food cost per participant that USDA reports, $64.89 a month, with the fruit and vegetable cash-value benefit listed separately, and its income limit for a family of four is the $61,050 in force from July 2026. The septic tank calculator sized a one-bedroom home at 750 gallons, below the minimums in state codes such as Minnesota’s 1,000 gallons and Pennsylvania’s and Florida’s 900, and now starts at 1,000; its FAQ and worked example, which had disagreed with the calculator and with each other, follow the same table. The student loan repayment and Medicaid calculators both used last year’s $5,500 step for each household member beyond eight, now $5,680, and the GI Bill FAQ quotes the $30,908.34 private-school tuition cap for 2026-27.
The estate tax exemption calculator was telling people to plan around a deadline that Congress removed. Alongside the correct 2026 exemption of $15 million it showed a second column headed post-sunset, putting the exemption at $7 million and computing the extra tax a family would owe once it fell — with planning advice to gift assets now while the exemption is high. That reversion was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act sunset, and it no longer exists. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act struck the subparagraph that carried the expiry date out of the statute and raised the underlying figure from $5 million to $15 million in the same stroke, so there is no lower amount left in the law to revert to; the only scheduled change is inflation indexing from 2027, which moves the number up. The $7 million was never an official figure for any year. It was a rounding of half the 2025 amount, and since July 2025 it has matched no provision, no date and no IRS publication. The column is gone in both languages, along with the planning table that was gated on it. In its place, when an estate does owe tax, the calculator now points at things that are actually true this year: the $19,000 annual exclusion, irrevocable trusts, and the state estate taxes that several states levy far below the federal threshold.
Spanish pages were carrying last year’s figures on eleven calculators while the English beside them had already been corrected, and in two places the same page contradicted itself. The estate and gift pages put the 2026 exemption at about $7 million, half of the $15 million the One Big Beautiful Bill Act actually set, and the married figure at $14 million rather than $30 million. Section 179 was quoted at a $1.25 million limit against the real $2.56 million, with the phase-out starting at $3.05 million instead of $4.09 million. The long-term capital gains page capped the 15% band at $492,300 in both languages when the 2026 ceiling is $545,500. SNAP showed the 2025 allotment table, $292 for one person where the current figure is $298, and the income limits that go with it. The poverty-level page used $32,150 for a family of four instead of $33,000, the mega-backdoor page used a $69,000 total contribution limit instead of $72,000, and the disability page quoted a $175 floor and a $3,900 ceiling against the rates in force since December, $180.42 and $3,938.58. The Spanish SALT page was the clearest case of self-contradiction: its second paragraph already used the raised $40,400 cap while its opening line and all three of its questions still described the $10,000 cap the law replaced. Two English errors surfaced in the same pass. The poverty-level worked example divided by $31,200 where the prose on the same page said $33,000, which moved the result from 240% to 227% of the federal poverty level, and the SNAP explanation rounded the three-person income limit to $2,980 rather than the $2,888 in force this fiscal year. Every corrected figure now has a guard entry, so the old value cannot quietly return.
The June sweep that corrected the arithmetic in 34 calculators after a run of law changes never touched the writing around them, so on a dozen pages the widget applied the new rule while the explanation, the worked example and the FAQ still asserted the old one. That has now been fixed page by page, in English and Spanish. The child and dependent care credit was the worst of them: the calculator applies the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rates that took effect with this tax year — a 50% top rate and a $7,500 dependent care FSA limit — while the text still promised 20-35%, a $5,000 FSA and a maximum credit of $1,050 or $2,100 against the real $1,500 and $3,000. The lottery page taxed a California jackpot at 12.3% in its worked example even though California does not tax its own lottery, as the FAQ two paragraphs below correctly said. The security deposit example doubled California’s legal maximum, quoting the two- and three-month limits that AB 12 replaced with one month’s rent on 1 July 2024. The USCIS fee and green card pages both still billed a separate $85 biometrics fee that was folded into the filing fees in April 2024. The two debt-to-income pages called 43% the ceiling for mortgage qualification, which the CFPB removed in favour of a price-based test back in October 2022 — a point the calculators themselves make on the same screen. Elsewhere the numbers had simply drifted: the EITC example ran on the 2022 tables, the Social Security maximum benefit page carried three different sets of figures for the same thing, the ACA page promised an 8.5% cap and a 0% tier that expired with the enhanced credits at the end of 2025, and the TRICARE, military clothing allowance, military pay and visa fee pages described input fields the calculators no longer have. Every figure was re-verified against a primary source — the statute, the IRS revenue procedure, the agency fee schedule — and every worked example was recomputed by hand so that its steps, its total and the calculator above it agree.
The alternative minimum tax pages were explaining the tax with 2024 numbers. The calculators themselves were right — anyone who entered their own figures got a correct answer — but the text around them gave the AMT exemption as $85,700 for single filers and $133,300 for married couples filing jointly, phasing out from $609,350 and $1,218,700. For 2026 the exemption is $90,100 and $140,200, and the phase-out begins at $500,000 and $1,000,000: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reset those thresholds outright instead of adjusting the old ones for inflation, which is why they move so far and not in the direction an inflation update would suggest. The same law doubled the speed at which the exemption disappears, from 25 cents to 50 cents for every dollar above the threshold, and one answer was still ending the 26% band at $239,100 rather than 2026’s $244,500. The worked example has been rebuilt around the current figures — a single filer with $225,000 of AMT income keeps the whole exemption and owes $35,074 of tentative minimum tax — and the Spanish pages now carry the same numbers, including one explanation that had been breaking off mid-sentence.
The maximum Social Security benefit page was quoting figures that came from nowhere. SSA publishes two numbers that both get called the 2026 maximum, and they are not the same measure: $4,152 a month for a worker retiring at full retirement age, which in 2026 falls at 66 years and 10 months, and $4,207 for one who starts at exactly 67, two months later. An earlier pass treated that gap as an error, kept $4,152 as the age-67 figure and filled the ages in between by scaling it, producing a table matching no SSA publication — and, in the FAQ, three figures ($4,108, $2,876 and $5,094) that had never been anyone’s official numbers. The calculator now follows SSA’s own maximum-taxable benefit examples for 2026: $2,969 at 62, $3,467 at 65, $3,752 at 66, $4,207 at 67 and $5,181 at 70, with the four ages SSA does not publish placed between them by the statutory early-retirement reduction and delayed-credit factors. The page now says which ages are published and which are interpolated, and a new question answers the $4,152 versus $4,207 difference directly. Two other pages carried the same fact and were also wrong: the Social Security estimator still showed 2025’s $4,018 and $5,108 as 2026 figures, and the SSDI page put its ceiling at $4,108 rather than $4,152. English and Spanish both.
A sweep of the 50-state transfer tax table found six more states priced with the wrong shape, not just the wrong number, and every one has been checked against the statute or the revenue agency before being changed. Connecticut’s conveyance tax is graduated and marginal on a residential estate of $800,000 or more — 0.75%, then 1.25%, then 2.25% (CGS §12-494(b)(2)) — and every town adds a municipal 0.25% the site was not charging at all; a $1,200,000 sale owes $14,000, not $9,000. Hawaii’s tax (HRS §247-2) is tiered on the whole price across two separate ladders, and the site had only the bottom rung of the lower one: a $12,000,000 sale to a buyer with no county homeowner exemption owes $150,000, not $12,000. New Jersey sellers pay a graduated per-$500 Realty Transfer Fee whose whole table changes above $350,000, plus the Graduated Percent Fee of 1% to 3.5% that replaced the buyer-paid mansion tax on 10 July 2025 — on $1,200,000 that is $11,995 plus $12,000, where a flat 0.40% had shown $4,800; both calculators were wrong here, and both are fixed. The District of Columbia charges the same rate twice, recordation on the deed and transfer on the seller, and steps from 1.1% to 1.45% on the entire price at $400,000: $11,600 on a $400,000 sale against the $4,400 shown before, and $2,800 more than the same sale at $399,999. Vermont taxes a principal residence at 0.5% on the first $200,000 — raised from $100,000 on 1 August 2024 — and a second home at a flat 3.4% under a rule added by the same act, plus a 0.22% clean water surcharge; its tax is also the buyer’s, not the seller’s. South Carolina’s deed recording fee is $1.85 per $500 (SC Code §12-24-10), not per $1,000, so it was understated by exactly half. Pennsylvania was not graduated, but the two calculators disagreed and the label contradicted the arithmetic — 1% computed under a label reading “2% total” — and both now apply the 2% that is 1% state plus the typical 1% local. New York’s 1% mansion tax turned out to be right: the progressive 1% to 3.9% schedule everyone quotes is Tax Law §1402-b, state law that applies only in a city of a million or more, and it plus the extra 0.25% of §1402(a)(2) were missing, so a $5,000,000 Manhattan sale was understated by $75,000 — $216,250, not $141,250. The Los Angeles city rate was out by a factor of ten, 0.045% where the Office of Finance states 0.45%, and Measure ULA’s 4% and 5.5% above $5.4 million and $10.9 million were not charged at all. Six states now ask a follow-up question, because the rate turns on whether the property is residential, whether it will be the buyer’s own home, or whether it is farm or forest land, and the city picker offers only the cities that are actually in the selected state.
Washington’s real estate excise tax was being charged as a flat percentage of the whole sale price, which is not how the state levies it. RCW 82.45.060 sets a graduated schedule in which each rate applies only to the portion of the price inside its own band: 1.10% up to $525,000, 1.28% from there to $1,525,000, 2.75% up to $3,025,000 and 3.00% above that. The two places on the site that priced a Washington sale did not even agree with each other — the closing costs calculator applied a flat 1.28%, the transfer tax calculator a flat 1.78%. A flat 1.28% overstates the state tax by exactly $945 on every sale in the second band and understates it badly higher up: a $2,000,000 sale owes $31,637.50, not $25,600. Both calculators now work through the bands. A $700,000 sale in Seattle comes to $8,015 of state tax plus $3,500 of local tax, $11,515 in all, an effective rate of 1.645%. The transfer tax calculator shows the state and local shares on separate lines and lets you set the local rate yourself — it is 0.50% in 195 of the 324 jurisdictions that charge one, but runs from zero to 2.00% across the state — and it now handles the flat 1.28% that agricultural land and timberland pay instead of the graduated rates. These thresholds hold through 31 December 2026; on 1 January 2027 each rises by $26,000, to $551,000, $1,551,000 and $3,051,000, with the four rates unchanged.
The Social Security WEP and GPO calculators told a story the law stopped telling in January 2025. Congress repealed the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset outright, for every benefit month from January 2024 onward, and the calculators themselves were corrected in June to return a reduction of zero. The explanations around them were not: they still described both rules in the present tense, quoted a maximum WEP cut of $587 a month in one place and $629.50 in another, and one answer stated that repeal proposals had never passed. All of that text has been rewritten in English and Spanish. The pages now open with the repeal, keep the old mechanics clearly labelled as history, and set out what SSA has already done, including the automatic increase and the one-time payment covering the months back to January 2024. The worked examples were rebuilt too; the WEP one had also been wrong on its own terms, applying a 75% factor to fifteen years of substantial earnings when twenty years or fewer drew the harshest reduction.
The IRS resets the Section 7520 rate every month, and September’s is 5.4%, up from 5.2% in August. That rate is pre-filled into the charitable remainder trust calculator and feeds straight into the deduction, so leaving it on the August figure would quietly value every trust at the wrong rate. The field, the explanation and the worked example now all read 5.4% — on the same $1,000,000 trust paying 5% for 20 years, the estimated deduction rises from about $387,000 to about $397,000 and the tax saving from about $124,000 to about $127,000, because a higher discount rate leaves a larger remainder for the charity.
The military overseas COLA calculator has been refreshed to the Defense Travel Management Office edition effective 1 September 2026. Twenty-eight duty stations changed: seventeen across South Korea rose two points, including Osan and Camp Humphreys (112 to 114) and Pusan (118 to 120); Christchurch and Wellington rose four points to 134; Albania rose to 136, Bern to 188, and Lima and the rest of Peru to 114. Four Russian localities fell, Moscow furthest, from 142 to 138. Germany, Guam and Hawaii were unchanged. DTMO reissues this table on the 1st and 16th of every month.
The cost of living calculator now covers all 50 states. Its city list had 30 entries concentrated in about half the country, so a state page like Nebraska’s or Vermont’s could only offer the generic Austin-to-New-York comparison, with no city from the state the page is named after. Twenty-nine cities have been added — one for each previously missing state, from Honolulu (index 172, the second-highest on the list) to Des Moines (82, now the lowest) — each cross-checked against at least two published cost-of-living sources and scaled to the table’s existing baseline, where the national average is 100. Every state cost-of-living page now opens comparing into a city of its own state, and the city dropdowns are sorted alphabetically now that there are 59 of them.
Spanish calculator pages now render their labels, result rows and button text in Spanish from the first paint. Previously the shared calculator components carried English text through to /es/ and only a subset of labels was translated; the translation now happens inside the components, so every calculator gets the same coverage without per-page work.

August 2026

The paid family leave calculator was using an out-of-date Colorado benefit formula. Colorado’s FAMLI programme resets on 1 July, not 1 January, and the cutoff below which wages are replaced at 90% had been left at $735.67 — a figure derived from the 2024-25 state average wage, paired with a cap from a different year. Both now follow the 2026-27 state average weekly wage of $1,608.91: the first $804.46 of weekly pay is replaced at 90% and the rest at 50%, capped at $1,448.02. A Coloradan earning $1,000 a week now sees $821.78, matching the state’s own worked example.
Visitors on a phone or tablet are now told the app exists, and pointed at the right store for their device — iPhone and iPad to the App Store, Android to Google Play. On iPhone and iPad in Safari this uses Apple’s own banner, which shows “Open” and jumps straight into the app when it is already installed. It is a slim bar at the foot of the page rather than a pop-up that covers what you came to read, it appears only after a few seconds, and dismissing it is remembered. The banner had been written months ago but was never actually placed on any page, so nobody had seen it.
State cost-of-living pages now open on their own state: the Nevada page starts with Las Vegas as the target city instead of a generic Austin-to-New York comparison, and the same applies wherever the state has a city in the comparison list. Spanish category pages stopped showing their one-line description in English, the Spanish investment property tax page had its tax row and passive-loss footnote translated, and the Elo calculator now reports the probability of the upset itself rather than the probability of the favorite winning.
The IRS raised the standard mileage rate mid-year — a rarity last seen in 2022 — and five calculators were still on the January figures. Since July 1, 2026 business miles deduct at 76 cents (was 72.5), medical and military moving miles at 23.5 cents (was 20.5), per IRS announcement IR-2026-29; the charity rate stays at its statutory 14 cents. The mileage log, mileage reimbursement, business mileage, gig platform comparison and military moving calculators now use the current rates, their worked examples are recomputed — the gig example notably flips, with the high-mileage platform coming out ahead once the richer deduction is applied — and the pages spell out which rate applies to trips from the first half of the year.
The sales tax calculator no longer opens with a 2% local rate in states whose local taxes cannot reach it. Mississippi tops out at 1% (Jackson), Florida at 1.5%, Vermont at 1% and Hawaii at 0.5% — yet the default showed a 9% combined rate for Mississippi that no jurisdiction in the state actually charges. Each of those pages now opens at its own maximum, matching the rate table printed below the calculator.
Ten new calculators for the military and federal-workforce audience, each built on primary-source 2026 data: Guard/Reserve drill pay and reserve retirement points (both on the official DFAS pay table), involuntary separation pay with the VA recoupment rule, the FERS military buyback deposit at the 4.25% CY2026 interest rate, the FERS annuity supplement with the $24,480 earnings test, the deployed Savings Deposit Program at its guaranteed 10%, leave sell-back versus terminal leave, VGLI premiums by age band against SGLI, a GS pay calculator carrying the complete OPM 2026 table with all 58 locality percentages, and federal TDY per diem with the 75% travel-day rule. Every one has a worked example, FAQs and a Spanish version.
The iPhone, iPad and Android apps can now have their ads switched off. A one-time purchase removes them for good on that Apple ID or Google account — it carries across your own devices, and the “Restore purchase” link in the app footer brings it back after a reinstall. For anyone who would rather not pay, watching one short video clears the ads for six hours. Nothing here changes the website, and no calculator is behind the purchase: everything on the site stays free either way.
The IRS late-payment interest rate on the penalty and extension calculators was seven quarters out of date. Both charged 8% a year — the rate that last applied in 2024 — while the rate in force for the third and fourth quarters of 2026 is 7%. On $5,000 owed three months late the interest falls from $100 to $88, and the worked example, the FAQ and the Spanish pages now all carry the same figure. The rate is reset by the IRS every quarter, and the page now says so rather than quoting a single quarter as though it were the year’s rate.
The charitable remainder trust calculator was showing three different figures for the same input: the discount rate field opened pre-filled at 5.4%, the explanation beneath it said 5%, and the rate the IRS actually published for August 2026 is 5.2%. Because the field was pre-filled, anyone who opened the page and read the result without touching that box got a deduction calculated at the wrong rate. All three now read 5.2%, and the text states that the IRS republishes this rate monthly instead of implying it holds for the year. The worked example was rebuilt to match what the calculator returns — on a $1,000,000 trust paying 5% for 20 years the estimated deduction is about $387,000 and the tax saving about $124,000, where the page had said $350,000 and $112,000.
Corrected the state tax figure on the fourteen states with a single flat rate — Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia, Arizona and the rest — where it was showing about a hundredth of the real amount for a few hours after the state tax feature went live. Pennsylvania on $75,000 now reads $2,302.50 rather than $23.02. States with graduated brackets were never affected.
The paycheck calculator now uses each state’s real tax brackets and deductions instead of a rough average rate. The old approach applied a flat guess — six percent for California, four and a half for two dozen states nobody had listed — which overstated California by about $1,585 and Arizona by $1,903 on a $75,000 salary. Nine states had no entry at all and silently got the generic figure.
The SALT deduction page was still advertising the $10,000 cap in its summary even though the calculator itself, and the explanation below it, correctly use the $40,400 cap that applies for 2026.
State income tax was missing from the calculator on every page named after a state. A Missouri visitor entering $75,000 saw the same total as a Florida visitor, even though Florida has no income tax and Missouri does — the page passed its state to the calculator and the calculator ignored it. All 51 state pages, 24 Maryland county pages and 56 Ohio city pages now show the state tax, and the Maryland and Ohio pages add the county or municipal tax the page is about. On $75,000 in Worcester County, Maryland the total tax goes from $13,407.50 to $18,146.38.
City sales tax pages were quoting California. The calculator on all 30 of them defaulted to California’s 7.25% state rate and a generic 2% local rate, while the rate table further down the same page showed the correct local figures. Sulphur, Louisiana now calculates at 5% state plus 5.45% local, matching its own table.
Removed two federal energy credits that no longer exist. The heat pump and home battery calculators were still deducting the 30% credits under Sections 25C and 25D, which expired on December 31, 2025; equipment installed in 2026 pays full price, and both pages now say so and point to state and utility programmes instead.
Cleaned up stray asterisks in 20 calculator explanations, where formatting marks had been left in the text and were showing up as literal characters mid-sentence.
Ten more calculators turned out to exist at two web addresses each — the same tool, usually under the same page title, reachable from two links. They came from a batch that re-added calculators already on the site back in April. Each is now one page at its original address, with the duplicate link redirecting there, so search engines and the site’s own navigation point at one copy instead of two.
The site had two Survivor Benefit Plan calculators competing for the same searches — one modelling only the premium and the annuity, the other adding the base-amount election, the paid-up point and the survivor break-even. They are now one page at the original address, running the fuller version, and the old link redirects there.
The Survivor Benefit Plan calculator now has the explainer, worked example and FAQs every other calculator already had — it was the last page on the site without them. The new material covers what the calculator itself models: net retired pay once the premium is deducted, what premiums total by the 360-month paid-up point, and how long a survivor collects before the annuity exceeds everything paid in. That break-even is 43 months whatever base amount you elect, because both sides of the comparison scale with the base.
Twenty new calculators covering the 2025–2026 law changes and the gaps they opened. On student loans: the Repayment Assistance Plan that opened 1 July 2026 (1–10% of AGI, $50 per dependent, interest waived, forgiveness at 360 payments), the new borrowing limits that replaced Grad PLUS, and a Student Aid Index calculator built from the official 2026-27 FAFSA formula tables.
On tax: the four Working Families deductions — tips, overtime, the $6,000 senior deduction and car loan interest — each modelled with its own phase-out and each showing what the popular name hides. “No tax on tips” is a deduction, not an exemption, so you save your marginal rate rather than the whole amount, and FICA still applies. “No tax on overtime” covers only the half-time premium, and only where the Fair Labor Standards Act required it — California daily overtime does not qualify.
Also new on tax: the 1% excise on cash-funded money transfers abroad that took effect 1 January 2026, an import duty calculator for the world after the $800 de minimis exemption ended, and a 1099-K threshold checker for the restored $20,000-and-200-transaction rule.
For drivers: a lease buyout calculator that counts the disposition fee and excess mileage charges you avoid by keeping the car, an upside-down loan calculator that shows when equity turns positive and whether GAP insurance covers more than it costs, and a total-loss settlement calculator including the sales tax and title fees most states require an insurer to pay.
For benefits and claims: an ABAWD work-requirement screener reflecting the age ceiling rising from 54 to 64 and the repeal of the veteran and homeless exemptions, SSDI back pay with the five-month waiting period and twelve-month retroactive cap, and VA back pay that applies each year’s own rate rather than one flat rate — which on a three-year retroactive claim is a difference of over $2,000.
Also added: a Trump Account projection that shows the deferred tax inside the balance instead of presenting the gross figure as spendable, a gig platform comparison that ranks apps by net pay per hour after mileage and self-employment tax, and settlement calculators for personal injury and workers compensation. Every new calculator has a worked example, FAQs and a Spanish translation.
Fixed calculators that were loading but never becoming interactive. On affected pages the tool appeared on screen yet ignored every click, and shared links carrying your inputs in the address bar opened with the defaults instead — the elder care calculator, for example, showed the assisted living figure even when the link asked for a nursing home. All 779 calculators now start up as soon as the page does.
Corrected state tax rates that were displaying a hundred times too small. Pennsylvania’s income tax was shown as 0.0307% rather than 3.07%, and sales and property tax rates were wrong the same way on state pages. The calculators themselves were unaffected — the error was in the figures printed around them.
New Survivor Benefit Plan calculator for military retirees: enter your retired pay and see the 6.5% premium against the 55% survivor annuity, your net retired pay after the deduction, what the premiums total by the 360-month paid-up point, and how long a survivor collects before the annuity exceeds everything paid in. Available in English and Spanish.
Every Ohio city tax page now says where residents actually file — through RITA, through Cleveland’s CCA, or directly with the city — based on the agencies’ own member lists, since sending a return to the wrong place is the most common filing mistake in Ohio’s municipal system. Cities with verified credit data also gained a worked commuter example showing exactly what a resident earning $60,000 in another city owes at home, and the credit-limit cap now appears in the rate table.
Maryland county pages now put each county’s rate in context — its rank among the state’s 24 jurisdictions, the annual dollar cost on $60,000 of taxable income, and how it compares with the statutory 3.30% ceiling — instead of a generic description shared by every county.
Corrected 2026 figures in the explanations and FAQs for the AMT, Earned Income Credit and adoption credit calculators. The calculators themselves were computing correctly, but the surrounding text still quoted 2025 amounts under a 2026 label: the AMT exemption is $90,100 single and $140,200 married filing jointly (not $88,100 / $137,000), the maximum EITC is $8,231 with three or more children (not $8,046), and the adoption credit is $17,670 (not $17,810). All figures now match IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32. The Spanish pages had three different sets of EITC numbers in circulation and now carry the same verified ones.
Rebuilt the worked example on the adoption credit page. Its later steps had been updated to the 2026 credit while the earlier steps still used the old maximum and the old phase-out band, so the arithmetic no longer followed from its own figures.
Checked all 15 Ohio cities administered by RITA against RITA’s own published 2026 rate table and corrected eight values. Springfield is 2.4% with a 50% credit (was shown as 2.0% with 100%), Sandusky is 1.25% with no credit for tax paid to other cities (was 1.5% with a full credit), and Piqua is 2.0% (was 1.75%). Credit rates were also wrong for Cuyahoga Falls, Strongsville and Medina — that credit is what stops you being taxed twice when you live in one Ohio city and work in another, so an overstated credit understated the tax owed.
Corrected the local income tax rate on six county and city pages after checking every rate against the issuing authority. Allegany County, Maryland is 3.20% (was 3.03%), Dorchester and Kent Counties are 3.30% (was 3.20%), and Cleveland, Ohio is 2.50% (was 2.00%). Maryland’s top state rate is now 6.50%, not 5.75% — two new upper brackets took effect for 2026 — so the combined state-and-local figure shown on every Maryland county page was understated.
Anne Arundel and Frederick Counties in Maryland charge a graduated local income tax rather than one flat rate, and their pages had been showing a single averaged percentage. Both now show the full bracket table for each filing status, taken from the Comptroller of Maryland’s 2026 withholding schedule.
Replaced the cookie banner with Google’s certified consent tool. Visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland still get a full consent choice before any advertising or analytics cookie is set, and residents of US states with a privacy law get that state’s opt-out — but the banner no longer interrupts everyone else. You can reopen your choices any time from the Privacy settings link in the footer.
The military COLA calculator was multiplying base pay by a percentage nobody publishes. It carried ten fixed figures — 12% for Germany, 15% for Okinawa, 8% for Hawaii — and none of them match anything the Defense Travel Management Office issues. What DTMO publishes is a cost index for each individual duty station on a scale where 100 is the average for the continental United States, and Germany alone has 64 of them, running from 118 at Bamberg to 154 at Munich. Okinawa was the worst case: the page quoted 15% and produced a monthly dollar amount for a station where overseas COLA is not authorized at all, as it is not at Misawa, Iwakuni, Kure, Camp Fuji, Eta Jima or Shariki either. The page is now a lookup over the real table — 656 duty stations across 196 countries and territories, from the 16 August 2026 edition — and shows your station’s index, what it means against the CONUS baseline, where it sits in that country’s range, and a plain statement when no COLA is payable there. It deliberately stops short of a dollar figure: the allowance is a percentage of spendable income rather than of base pay, so it depends on your pay grade, years of service and dependents, and the page sends you to DTMO’s own rate lookup for the amount — which is what the DTMO table itself tells readers to do.

July 2026

Aligned every calculator and guide with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for 2026: the Child Tax Credit is now $2,200 per child (from $2,000), the Section 179 limit is $2,560,000 (phase-out at $4,090,000), bonus depreciation is 100% and permanent, and the federal estate and lifetime gift exemption is $15,000,000 per person.
Corrected the 2026 standard deduction to $16,100 (single), $32,200 (married filing jointly), and $24,150 (head of household) — plus the $2,050/$1,650 age-65-and-blindness additions — in the tax-free-income, self-employment, itemized-deduction, 1099, and withholding calculators, and recomputed every worked example that relied on the old figures.
Updated more 2026 figures after a page-by-page review: the Social Security wage base ($184,500), SIMPLE IRA limits ($17,000, or $21,000 at 50+), 457(b) and TSP limits ($24,500, or $32,500 at 50+), military BAS ($476.95 enlisted / $328.48 officer), and the LIHEAP poverty guidelines — with every affected worked example recalculated.
Fixed display and sourcing issues found in the same review: state pages showed flat income-tax and property-tax rates 100× too small (0.0495% instead of 4.95%), the asphalt calculator understated tonnage, some formulas and symbols rendered as raw code, and several guides cited the wrong agency.
State pages now open on their own state: the Illinois sales-tax calculator no longer starts on California’s rate, Vermont property tax uses Vermont’s 1.83% instead of the 1.1% national average, states with no local sales tax no longer add a phantom 2%, and the paycheck and income-tax calculators arrive with your state already selected.
Rewrote every Spanish guide paragraph that the translation process had cut short — 621 in all — so the Spanish site now carries the complete explanation behind each calculator rather than a sentence that stops halfway. Spanish pages also render their labels in Spanish from the start instead of switching after load.
The blood alcohol calculator now flags that Utah’s legal limit is 0.05%, not the 0.08% used in the other 49 states and DC — and that Utah applies it to out-of-state drivers — along with the lower thresholds for drivers under 21 and commercial drivers.

June 2026

Calk-USA is now on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, joining the Android app on Google Play — links in the footer.
The native apps run fully offline and refresh their tax and benefit values automatically over the air — no app update required.
Refreshed all federal and 50-state figures to official 2026 values: IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 (income tax, EITC, AMT, capital gains, education credits), SSA benefits, CMS Medicare premiums and IRMAA, USDA SNAP FY2026 allotments, the USCIS G-1055 fee schedule, and state law — including Utah’s new 4.45% flat income tax (SB 60).
Completed a state-by-state re-verification against each Department of Revenue and Labor: updated 2026 standard deductions, estate-tax exemptions, and minimum and tipped wages, and corrected local sales-tax coverage for all 50 states and DC.
Every state calculator and category page now includes an in-depth, plain-English guide and frequently-asked questions explaining the rules behind each calculation, with the source for each figure cited.
Ongoing source monitoring keeps regulatory figures current: recent refreshes include the 2026 paid-family-leave benefit caps (CA $1,765, NJ $1,119, WA $1,647) and the national grid emissions factor used by the carbon-footprint and solar-savings calculators.
Vehicle Depreciation Schedule: now asks whether the vehicle is a passenger auto (≤6,000 lbs) or a heavy vehicle (>6,000 lbs), so the IRS Section 280F luxury-auto caps apply correctly by weight — fixing a flat cost threshold that previously over- or under-stated the deduction.

April 2026

Launched Calk-USA with 708 calculators across 24 categories
Full coverage of all 50 US states + DC with state-specific paycheck, income tax, sales tax, property tax, minimum wage, and cost of living calculators (312 state pages)
Fortress-tier complex calculators: Federal Income Tax, Paycheck (all 50 states), Mortgage (conventional, FHA, VA, jumbo, ARM), 401(k), Roth IRA, Roth Conversion, Social Security Break-Even, Self-Employment Tax, Student Loan IDR Comparison
Full retirement suite: 401(k), 403(b), 457(b), SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, Solo 401(k), Defined Benefit, TSP, FERS, CSRS, FIRE variants (Coast/Lean/Barista), RMD, Pension, Annuity
Complete tax toolkit: AMT, SALT, Estate Tax, Gift Tax, Kiddie Tax, QBI 199A, W-4 Optimizer, Quarterly Estimated, Capital Gains, Tax Loss Harvesting, Charitable Donation, Education Credits
Real estate investing: Cap Rate, DSCR, 1031 Exchange, House Flip, Airbnb, Rental Property, Cost Segregation, Depreciation
Business suite: LLC vs S-Corp, Break-Even, EBITDA, Business Valuation, SaaS Metrics, Franchise Cost, Amazon FBA/Etsy/eBay fees
Health & insurance: ACA Marketplace, Medicare IRMAA, HSA, FSA, COBRA, Life Insurance Needs, Long-Term Care
Government benefits: SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, SSDI, SSI, Unemployment, VA Disability, GI Bill, Military Pay
50+ building calculators: concrete, paint, roofing, flooring, deck, fence, tile, drywall, insulation, HVAC, solar, and more
All calculators use 2026 IRS rates, SSA data, and state-specific regulations