[FN-02] Key Numbers 2026

The Annual Reference Page — Single Source of Truth for Figures

Pillar: Foundations · Last verified: August 2026 · Refresh cadence: Every November–January (most figures announced Oct–Nov of the prior year) Type: Reference Convention: Other wiki articles cite this page instead of hard-coding numbers wherever practical.

Verification legend: ✅ = confirmed against primary/authoritative source during the Aug 2026 audit · ◻️ = high confidence, confirm against the primary source before acting on it

Not advice. Educational reference. Figures on this page are year-stamped and go stale on a predictable schedule — most are superseded between October and January. Anything ◻️ is unconfirmed. Before acting on a number here, check it against the primary source cited in its section (Rev. Proc., SSA, CMS, or HHS release).

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1. Federal Income Tax (Tax Year 2026 — Rev. Proc. 2025-32)

The seven rates (10/12/22/24/32/35/37%) are now permanent under OBBBA; thresholds index annually. ✅

Brackets (taxable income) — Rev. Proc. 2025-32 §3.01, read directly: ✅

Rate	Single	Married Filing Jointly	Head of Household
10%	$0 – $12,400	$0 – $24,800	$0 – $17,700
12%	– $50,400	– $100,800	– $67,450
22%	– $105,700	– $211,400	– $105,700
24%	– $201,775	– $403,550	– $201,750
32%	– $256,225	– $512,450	– $256,200
35%	– $640,600	– $768,700	– $640,600
37%	above	above	above

The single 22% band tops out at $105,700 against $211,400 joint — exactly half. That asymmetry is the widow(er)’s trap (TX-02 §3).

Standard deduction: ✅

Filing status	2026
Single / MFS	$16,100
Head of Household	$24,150
Married Filing Jointly	$32,200
Additional, age 65+ (or blind)	+$2,050 unmarried · +$1,650 per married spouse
OBBBA senior “bonus” deduction (2025–2028 only)	+$6,000 per person 65+ ($12,000/couple); phases out above $75k single / $150k MFJ MAGI ✅

Planning note: a 65+ MFJ couple can reach a combined deduction of $32,200 + $3,300 + $12,000 = $47,500 — a large zero-bracket that changes Roth-conversion and gain-harvesting math through 2028. → TX-02, TX-06

2. Capital Gains & Investment Income (2026)

Rate thresholds by taxable income (Rev. Proc. 2025-32 §3.03 — all five filing statuses verified against the primary source, Aug 2026): ✅

Filing status	0% up to	15% up to	20% above
Married filing jointly / surviving spouse	$98,900	$613,700	—
Head of household	$66,200	$579,600	—
Single	$49,450	$545,500	—
Married filing separately	$49,450	$306,850	—
Estates and trusts	$3,300	$16,250	—

Item	Threshold
NIIT (3.8%) MAGI trigger — not indexed	$200,000 single · $250,000 MFJ ✅

The 0% bracket stacks on top of deductions: an MFJ couple with no other income can realize ~$131,100 of gains ($32,200 + $98,900) at 0% federal. Every dollar of other income displaces a dollar of that capacity. → TX-01

3. Retirement Account Limits (2026)

Account	Base limit	Catch-up
401(k)/403(b)/457(b) elective deferral	$24,500 ✅	+$8,000 (50+) ✅ · +$11,250 (ages 60–63) ✅
Total DC plan limit (§415)	$72,000 ◻️	—
Traditional/Roth IRA	$7,500 ✅	+$1,100 (50+) ✅
SIMPLE IRA	$17,000 ✅	+$4,000 (50+) ✅
HSA (Rev. Proc. 2025-19)	$4,400 self / $8,750 family ✅	+$1,000 each (55+) ✅ — each catch-up needs its own HSA → HC-04
HSA — HDHP minimum deductible / OOP max	$1,700 / $8,500 self · $3,400 / $17,000 family ✅	—
Roth IRA income phase-out	~$153k–$168k single · ~$242k–$252k MFJ ◻️

Reminder: high earners aged 50+ with prior-year wages over ~$145k must make catch-ups as Roth (SECURE 2.0, effective 2026). ◻️

4. RMDs, QCDs & Related (2026)

Item	Value
RMD start age	73 (born 1951–1959) · 75 (born 1960+) ✅
QCD annual limit (per person, 70½+)	$111,000 ✅
Inherited IRA (most non-spouse heirs)	10-year rule; annual RMDs required in years 1–9 if decedent had begun RMDs ✅
SEPP / 72(t) max interest rate	Greater of 5.00% or 120% of the federal mid-term AFR (either of the 2 months before the first distribution) — Notice 2022-6 ✅ · 120% of mid-term was 4.57% in Jan 2026, so the 5% floor governs in this environment ◻️ → ER-03

5. Social Security (2026)

Item	Value
COLA	2.8% ✅
Taxable wage base	$184,500 ✅
Earnings test — under FRA all year	$24,480 ($1 withheld per $2 over) ✅
Earnings test — year reaching FRA	$65,160 ($1 per $3 over, until FRA month) ✅
Max benefit at FRA	$4,152/mo ✅
Max benefit claiming at 70	$5,181/mo ✅
Max benefit claiming at 62	$2,969/mo ✅
One work credit	$1,890 in earnings (4/yr max) ✅
PIA bend points (fixed for life to the cohort turning 62 in 2026)	90% of first $1,286 · 32% to $7,749 · 15% above ✅ → SS-01
Max family benefit bend points	$1,643 / $2,371 / $3,093 ✅
Average benefit, retired worker (Jan 2026)	$2,071/mo ✅
Average benefit, aged couple both receiving	$3,208/mo ✅
Average benefit, aged widow(er) alone	$1,919/mo ✅

Claiming-age adjustment (statutory, not annual): reduced 5/9 of 1%/month for the first 36 months before FRA, 5/12 of 1%/month beyond; increased 2/3 of 1%/month (8%/yr) after FRA, ceasing at 70. At FRA 67 that is 70% of PIA at 62 and 124% at 70. ✅ → SS-01

Trust-fund status (2026 Trustees Report): OASI reserves projected depleted Q4 2032, with 78% of scheduled benefits payable from ongoing revenue; combined OASDI 2034 at 83% (combining the funds requires legislation). ✅ → FN-03

6. Medicare (2026)

Item	Value
Part B standard premium	$202.90/mo ✅
Part B deductible	$283/yr ✅
Part A inpatient deductible (per benefit period)	~$1,736 ◻️
Part D avg standalone premium / max deductible	$34.50 / $615 ✅
Part D out-of-pocket cap	$2,100 ✅

IRMAA (based on 2024 MAGI — the two-year lookback): ✅ thresholds and premiums (Aug 2026 audit — Part B tiers are 35/50/65/80/85% of program cost vs. the 25% standard share; Part D amounts derive from the $38.99 national base beneficiary premium)

Surcharges are per person — a married couple pays double every annual figure below.

2024 MAGI single	2024 MAGI MFJ	Part B total/mo	Part B surcharge/mo	Part D surcharge/mo	Combined/yr per person
≤ $109,000	≤ $218,000	$202.90	—	—	$0
– $137,000	– $274,000	$284.10	$81.20	$14.50	$1,148.40
– $171,000	– $342,000	$405.80	$202.90	$37.50	$2,884.80
– $205,000	– $410,000	$527.50	$324.60	$60.40	$4,620.00
– <$500,000	– <$750,000	$649.20	$446.30	$83.30	$6,355.20
≥ $500,000	≥ $750,000	$689.90	$487.00	$91.00	$6,936.00

The top tier ($500k/$750k) is frozen — no inflation indexing until 2028 (Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018); the lower four index annually to CPI-U. Note the top MFJ threshold is 1.5× the single line, not 2×. ✅

→ Bracket management and SSA-44 appeals: HC-06

7. ACA Marketplace (2026 plan year)

Item	Value
Governing poverty guidelines	2025 HHS FPL ✅
100% FPL (48 states)	$15,650 +$5,500/person ✅
138% FPL — Medicaid floor (expansion states)	$21,597 (1) · $29,187 (2) · $44,367 (4) — below this, Medicaid not APTC ✅ → HC-03
200% FPL — Basic Health Program floor (MN, OR, NY, DC)	$31,300 (1) · $42,300 (2) · $64,300 (4) — in BHP jurisdictions the effective APTC floor, since BHP eligibility blocks the credit ✅ → HC-03
400% FPL cliff	$62,600 (1) · $84,600 (2) · $128,600 (4) ✅
CSR lines (Silver only)	150% FPL → 94% AV · 200% → 87% · 250% → 73% ✅
Applicable percentages	2.10% → 9.96% (Rev. Proc. 2025-25) — full table in HC-01 ✅
APTC repayment caps	Eliminated (OBBBA), 2026 forward ✅
Bronze/Catastrophic plans HSA-eligible	Yes, new for 2026 ✅
Direct primary care fee cap (HSA-compatible)	$150/mo self · $300/mo family, indexed ✅ — a qualifying DPC arrangement is no longer a disqualifying health plan for HSA purposes, and the fee is itself a qualified expense, for months beginning after 31 December 2025 (OBBBA; IRS Notice 2026-05). Excludes procedures requiring general anaesthesia, prescription drugs other than vaccines, and most laboratory services ✅ → HC-05, HC-04

8. Estate & Gift (2026)

Item	Value
Federal estate/gift exemption	$15,000,000 per person (OBBBA; indexed after 2026) ✅
Top transfer tax rate (estate, gift, GST)	40% ✅
Annual gift exclusion	$19,000 per recipient ✅
GST exemption	$15,000,000 per person — separate from, but equal to, the estate/gift exemption ✅ · not portable between spouses ✅
Annual gift exclusion — non-citizen spouse	$194,000 (2026) · $190,000 (2025) ✅ — the unlimited marital deduction does not apply; a QDOT is required at death → EP-05 §7
Nonresident non-citizen estate exemption	~$60,000 of U.S.-situs assets ◻️
Portability	Yes — an executor must file Form 706 at the first death and elect it, even when no tax is due ✅
Portability deadlines	9 months · 15 with the automatic extension · up to 5 years under the simplified late election of Rev. Proc. 2022-32 ✅ → EP-05 §3

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Example state layer: Washington (State notes convention — full 50-state tables in ST-04)

Item	Value
State income tax	None — no tax on wages, SS, pensions, IRA withdrawals, or Roth conversions ✅
Capital gains excise tax	7% on LTCG above ~$278k (indexed) + additional 2.9% above $1M (9.9% top) — real estate exempt ◻️
Estate tax	Exclusion $3,000,000, frozen — SB 6347 (signed Mar 2026) restored the 10%–20% rate schedule for deaths on or after July 1, 2026, reversing the 35% top rate that applied July 2025–June 2026, and re-tied indexing to a discontinued CPI series, so the exclusion no longer rises ✅; no portability between spouses (credit-shelter planning matters) ✅
WA Cares (LTC)	0.58% payroll tax; $36,500 lifetime benefit (indexed) ◻️
Community property	Yes — full double step-up in basis at first spouse’s death ✅
Medicaid expansion / exchange	Expanded (Apple Health, 138% FPL floor); Washington Healthplanfinder; Cascade Care Savings state subsidies ✅

The WA takeaway: income-tax paradise for Roth conversions and IRA drawdowns, but an estate-tax trap above $3M/person — the state layer inverts parts of the federal playbook. The 2026 rate rollback cut the top rate but froze the exclusion, so the trap widens every year by inflation alone.

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Canonical figures & retired values (machine-checked)

This table is read by .github/scripts/check_wiki.py. It exists because this wiki’s demonstrated failure mode is not a wrong number — it is a right number that goes stale in some articles and not others. The Washington estate exclusion was wrong in this page, accidentally right in two others, and survived a first correction pass in two more. Eight State-notes callouts deliberately duplicate state figures, so every load-bearing number lives in several places at once.

How it works. A figure listed in Retired is one this wiki used to carry and no longer accepts. Any article containing a retired value is an error, so the annual refresh cannot silently half-finish.

Two escapes, for legitimate history:

• Anything under a ## Change log or ## Refresh log heading is exempt — those sections exist to record what changed.
• Any line carrying the literal marker (historical) is exempt, for body prose that deliberately names a superseded figure.

Retired values must be dollar amounts and distinctive. This is the rule the first run of the check taught us, at the cost of 38 false positives. Percentages and bare numbers recur as bracket rates. Worse, round dollar amounts recur constantly inside worked examples — $30,000 of basis, $2,000 of gains, $18,000 of spending — so retiring them flags a dozen innocent lines and the check becomes noise. Indexed and odd amounts ($3,076,000, $96,700, $202.90) are safe because nothing else in the corpus looks like them.

Curation procedure: before adding a value in either column, grep the corpus for it. Zero foreign hits means it is safe to declare. Hits mean either genuine drift to fix, or a value too round to declare — in which case leave it out and rely on the refresh sweep. $30,000, $15,000, $2,000 and $18,000 were all tested and rejected on exactly this basis.

The rule covers the Canonical column too, which is a lesson this table learned the hard way. The 2026 direct-primary-care caps — $150 and $300 — were declared canonical without the grep, on the reasoning that only retired values can produce false positives. That is wrong: a canonical value drives the refresh runbook, so a round one puts articles on the November sweep list that never carried the figure. Those two rows claimed eleven and nine articles; one article carried each. They were withdrawn, and the matcher was hardened to reject magnitude suffixes ($300k had been reading as $300).

A second test, cheaper than the grep: the table exists for figures duplicated across articles. A figure that lives in one article has nothing for the runbook to sweep and does not need a row — cite it from that article’s prose instead, which is where the DPC caps now live (§7).

Refresh procedure: when a figure moves, put the new value in Canonical and the old one in Retired in the same commit. The checker then names every article still carrying the old figure — which is the November refresh runbook, generated rather than maintained by hand.

Stable IDs. Every figure carries an ID of the form F{year}.{SLUG}. The ID, not the label and certainly not the amount, is the durable handle: F2026.MFJ_STD survives the value moving from $32,200 to whatever 2027 brings, and it is what a change-impact question is asked in terms of. The year in the prefix is the plan year the figure governs, so a future page covering a second year adds F2027.* rows rather than overwriting these.

python3 .github/scripts/check_wiki.py --impact F2026.WA_ESTATE_EXCLUSION

That prints the figure, its retired values, and every article carrying either — the blast radius of a change, before you make it. It is the same question the August 2026 Washington correction had to answer by grepping four candidate spellings by hand, and getting it wrong the first time.

Two things the checker now enforces about this table itself, because a numbers authority that disagrees with its own summary table is the worst of both worlds:

• Every ID is unique and well-formed. Two rows cannot claim the same handle.
• Every canonical value must appear elsewhere in this article. The table summarises FN-02’s figures; it may not declare one the body doesn’t carry, and it may not drift from the body when only one of the two is updated.
• No value may be canonical in one row and retired in another. That contradiction would make the retired-figure check fire on a correct article.

ID	Label	Canonical (2026)	Retired
F2026.PART_B	Part B standard premium	$202.90	$185.00 · $174.70
F2026.PART_B_DEDUCTIBLE	Part B annual deductible	$283	$257
F2026.PART_D_CAP	Part D out-of-pocket cap	$2,100	—
F2026.PART_D_BASE	Part D national base premium	$38.99	$36.78
F2026.MFJ_STD	MFJ standard deduction	$32,200	$29,200
F2026.SINGLE_STD	Single standard deduction	$16,100	$14,600
F2026.MFJ_LTCG_0	MFJ 0% LTCG ceiling	$98,900	$96,700 · $94,050
F2026.SINGLE_LTCG_0	Single 0% LTCG ceiling	$49,450	$48,350 · $47,025
F2026.MFJ_22_TOP	MFJ 22% bracket top	$211,400	$206,700
F2026.QCD_LIMIT	QCD annual limit	$111,000	$108,000 · $105,000
F2026.IRMAA_T1_SINGLE	IRMAA tier-1 threshold, single	$109,000	$106,000 · $103,000
F2026.IRMAA_T1_MFJ	IRMAA tier-1 threshold, MFJ	$218,000	$212,000 · $206,000
F2026.FPL400_HH1	400% FPL, household of 1	$62,600	$60,240
F2026.FPL400_HH2	400% FPL, household of 2	$84,600	$81,760
F2026.FPL138_HH2	138% FPL, household of 2	$29,187	$28,207
F2026.ESTATE_EXEMPTION	Federal estate/gift exemption	$15,000,000	$13,990,000 · $13,610,000
F2026.GIFT_EXCLUSION	Annual gift exclusion	$19,000	—
F2026.HSA_SELF	HSA contribution limit, self	$4,400	$4,300 · $4,150
F2026.HSA_FAMILY	HSA contribution limit, family	$8,750	$8,550 · $8,300
F2026.WA_ESTATE_EXCLUSION	Washington estate exclusion	$3,000,000	$3,076,000 · $3,080,000 · $2,193,000

A — in Retired means the predecessor figure was too round to retire safely (the Part D cap’s prior $2,000 and the gift exclusion’s prior $18,000 both collide with worked-example amounts). Those still get swept by hand each November; they just cannot be machine-checked.

The Washington row is the one this table was built for — every retired value in it was carried live somewhere in this corpus at some point during August 2026.

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Refresh log

Date	Action
Aug 2026	Page created; figures audited against IRS Rev. Procs. 2025-25/2025-32, SSA 2026 COLA fact sheet, CMS 2026 premium releases, KFF/CRS analyses
Aug 2026	◻️ closed — the 15% capital-gains ceilings were carried unverified. Rev. Proc. 2025-32 §3.03 read directly; all five filing statuses now exact and ✅, with head-of-household, MFS, and the estates-and-trusts line ($3,300) added — the last matters for anyone holding appreciated assets in a non-grantor trust.
Aug 2026	Correction — max benefit claiming at 70 was carried as ~$5,251 (last year’s figure grossed up by the COLA). SSA’s own 2026 maximum-benefit answer is $5,181; max at 62 ($2,969) added alongside it. The COLA does not carry a max-benefit figure forward — each claiming-age maximum is recomputed.
Aug 2026	Correction — the Washington estate tax line carried “top rate 35% — the nation’s highest,” which went stale on July 1, 2026. SB 6347 (signed March 2026) rolled the schedule back to the pre-2025 10%–20% brackets; 35% applied only to deaths from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026. Verified against the Washington DOR estate tax and rate-table pages. The exclusion is $3,000,000 and frozen — SB 6347 re-tied indexing to the discontinued Seattle–Tacoma–Bremerton CPI, so the previously-carried “indexed” language and the ~$3.08M figure in ST-04 were both wrong going forward; $3,076,000 applied only through June 30, 2026. Note DOR’s rate-table page groups “July 1, 2026 and after” with the legacy $2,193,000 exclusion row — that grouping describes the rate schedule, not the exclusion, which DOR’s main estate tax page states as $3,000,000.
Nov 2026	(scheduled) 2027 figures: Rev. Proc. 2026-26 ACA percentages already published (2.15%→10.22%); watch Senate action on enhanced PTC restoration