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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

To my understanding, getting married does not automatically save you a lot on taxes. It depends on your financial situation. If, for example, you make $360k and your spouse makes $40k, it's going to be a win, because it works out to reducing your tax rate and increasing your spouse's. If you make $200k and your spouse makes $200k, it will be a wash because your tax rates are the same.

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Actually, if you each make $200k, you'll end up paying more taxes. Up to a combined taxable income of $146,400, two people making the same amount would pay the same amount of taxes whether or not they are married. Above that, they will pay more if they are married than if they are single.

I'm pretty sure my partner and I will face a loss when we marry, because our combined incomes will push us into a higher tax bracket.

It's possible, because the tax code is complex, but married-filing-jointly has a lower tax rate.

For example, let's assume you both have 40k taxable income:

Single, taxable income 40k: tax is $5,935

Married, taxable (combined) income 80k: tax is $11,864

Double the tax on "single", because you would file two returns, and you get $11,870. So you actually saved $6!

Taken directly from the tax table: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

Yeah, using these figures our married tax liability still ends up being more. I suspect because our incomes are very similar and there is a steep hike (5%) between tax bracket we would be in individually and the one that applies to us if we got married.

Yeah, there are some nasty non-linearities in the tax rate. (Although you do know it is incremental tax rate, right?) My point was mostly that "in general" it's generally a wash.

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