Updates

Rate changes, new calculators, and improvements.

August 2026

  • The IRS late-payment interest rate on the penalty and extension calculators was seven quarters out of date.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