Updates

Rate changes, new calculators, and improvements.

October 2026

Massachusetts raised its maximum weekly unemployment benefit to $1,154 for claims filed from October 4, 2026, up from $1,105, and the unemployment calculator now uses it. The claim date still decides: a claim filed before October 4 keeps the $1,105 maximum. Benefits still last up to 30 weeks, and the $25 a week per dependent child is paid on top of the maximum.
The IRS Section 7520 rate for October 2026 is 5.6%, up from 5.4% in September (Rev. Rul. 2026-19). The charitable remainder trust calculator now opens at 5.6%; on a $1,000,000 annuity trust paying 5% a year for 20 years the charitable deduction rises from about $397,000 to $407,000.
The overseas COLA lookup now uses DTMO’s index table of October 1, 2026. Okinawa, Iwakuni, Kure, Camp Fuji and Eta Jima, which had no overseas COLA, now carry an index of 104, and Shariki 102; Misawa still has none. Most of Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Australia and Canada moved up 2 to 8 points (Kaiserslautern 128 to 130), Switzerland, Chile and Morocco fell 4 points, and central London is now listed separately (index 144).
Federal per diem and SNAP moved to their fiscal 2027 figures on October 1, 2026. The per diem calculator now opens at the new standard CONUS rate of $113 a night for lodging, up $3 after last year’s freeze, with meals and incidentals unchanged at $68, so a 5-day trip comes to $758 instead of $746 (GSA, Federal Register 2026-18439). The SNAP calculator uses the new maximum benefits, $306 a month for one person, $808 for three and $1,023 for four, and the new gross income limits, $2,960 a month for three. Households larger than eight add $225 per person up to the legal cap of $3,887 for 18 or more people; before, the extra amount grew without a limit.
Paid family leave in the District of Columbia changed on October 1, 2026 under the fiscal 2027 Budget Support Act: the maximum weekly benefit fell from $1,190 to $1,100 for every type of leave, medical leave is now 10 weeks instead of 12 and family leave 6 instead of 12, while parental leave stays at 12 weeks and prenatal leave at 2. The paid family leave calculator now uses the $1,100 maximum for DC.
The District of Columbia’s sales tax did not rise to 7% on October 1, 2026 as scheduled: the Office of Tax and Revenue has postponed the increase, and the general rate stays at 6% through September 30, 2027. The DC sales tax and cost of living pages had said 7% from October 1 and now give the 6% rate.

September 2026

Florida’s minimum wage rose to $15.00 an hour on September 30, 2026, the last step of the 2020 constitutional amendment, and the cash wage for tipped employees to $11.98 ($15.00 less the $3.02 tip credit). The Florida paycheck, minimum wage and state comparison calculators now use the new rates. FloridaCommerce says $15.00 stays in place through December 31, 2027; after that the wage is adjusted for inflation every January 1. The page no longer says Florida cities can set a higher minimum for their contractors: since the same date state law lets a city or county pay more only to its own employees and to businesses that take a local tax break or subsidy.
The moving tax deduction calculator now covers intelligence-community employees and new appointees, who from 2026 can deduct a move for a change of assignment under the same rules as active-duty military (P.L. 119-21). Before, anyone who was not in the military got $0 and a note that only service members qualify. The deduction stays suspended for most other civilians, now permanently rather than through 2025.
The title insurance calculator now prices Ohio policies from the rate manual of the Ohio Title Insurance Rating Bureau, with the base rates raised on January 1, 2026 for the first time since 2002, instead of one flat rate. Choose the ALTA Homeowner’s Policy, which the Columbus and Toledo purchase contracts call for, or the standard owner’s policy, which costs 15% less. A $400,000 home with a $320,000 mortgage comes to $2,524.75 ($2,374.75 for the Homeowner’s Policy and $150 for the lender’s policy issued with it), or $2,215 with the standard policy; the calculator showed $1,880. A new FAQ compares the 2026 rates with the old ones.
The title insurance calculator now prices Texas policies from the rates the Texas Department of Insurance sets for every title company, including the 6.2% cut of March 1, 2026, and Pennsylvania policies from the TIRBOP rate manual. A $400,000 home with a $320,000 mortgage comes to $2,362 in Texas ($2,262 for the owner’s policy and $100 for the lender’s issued with it) and $2,735 in Pennsylvania, where the two policies are rated as one; the calculator showed $2,900 and $2,100 from one flat rate on the sale price. You now enter the mortgage for every state, because the lender’s policy insures the loan: a cash purchase has none, a Florida loan larger than the price pays the regular rate on the difference, and the average rates for California, Illinois, Ohio and other states apply the lender’s rate to the loan instead of the price. The “who pays” line was corrected too: in Pennsylvania the buyer pays both policies, in Southern California the seller customarily pays the owner’s policy, and in Ohio it depends on the region.
The title insurance calculator now prices New York policies from the TIRSA rate manual the state approves, instead of one flat rate. Choose Zone 2 (New York City, Long Island, the Hudson Valley counties, Albany and Rensselaer, where the premium includes the title search) or Zone 1 for the rest of the state, and enter your mortgage: the lender’s policy is now priced on the loan, at 30% of the loan rate when it is issued with the owner’s policy. A $400,000 home in New York City with a $320,000 mortgage comes to $2,391.93, $1,977.10 for the owner’s policy and $414.83 for the lender’s; the calculator showed $2,600 and priced the lender’s policy on the sale price. It also said the seller pays the owner’s policy, but in New York the buyer customarily pays for both.
Six more new calculators. Selling a home works out the $250,000 or $500,000 exclusion with partial exclusions, home-office depreciation and 2026 rates; step-up in basis compares selling an inherited asset with receiving it as a gift; NYC closing costs adds up mortgage recording tax, mansion taxes, transfer taxes and title insurance to the dollar the city’s own ACRIS calculator shows; the merchant cash advance and invoice factoring calculators turn factor rates and factoring fees into the APR that California and New York require lenders to disclose; and judgment interest covers all 50 states, DC and federal courts at the rates in force after the September 17 prime-rate increase. The transfer tax calculator now rounds the New York State tax up to each $500 and charges no NYC transfer tax on sales of $25,000 or less, as the law says.
Five more new calculators. BRS continuation pay by service for 2026, from the Navy’s 2.5 times to the Coast Guard’s 9 times, on the pay-table cell each service actually uses; a GRAT and a CLAT calculator that value trusts at the IRS Section 7520 rate for the month you fund them; a QSBS calculator with the new 50/75/100% tiers and $15 million cap for startup stock bought after July 4, 2025; and an inheritance tax calculator for the five states that still tax heirs. The shared military basic pay table now matches every cell of the DFAS 2026 chart: about 110 cells had been computed rather than copied and were $0.02 to $1.50 off, and pay stopped rising after 26 years, so an E-9 at 30 years showed $9,268.20 a month instead of $9,730.20. The bonus calculator also no longer lets an officer exclude the $225 of imminent danger pay twice.
Four new calculators. The inherited IRA RMD calculator applies the final 2024 regulations: the 10-year rule, the annual RMDs a beneficiary owes when the owner had already started RMDs, life expectancy for spouses, minor children and beneficiaries close in age, and the 2021-2024 waivers; the RMD calculator’s “inherited IRA” option used the owner’s table and now sends you there. The TIPS ladder calculator prices a ladder from Treasury’s own TIPS prices: $40,000 a year of inflation-adjusted income for 2027-2056 costs about $785,854. The IRMAA calculator shows your 2026 Medicare surcharge bracket and how much more income fits before the next one, and the CRDP vs CRSC calculator compares both concurrent-receipt programs for military retirees, before and after tax.
The business valuation calculator now prices a small business the way buyers do, on a multiple of seller’s discretionary earnings from businesses actually sold in its sector from 2021 to 2025 (BizBuySell). It used to average revenue, earnings and asset values with multiples that matched no data, 4 to 8 times net profit for a service business and 15 to 30 times for software; comparable businesses sold for a median 2.38 and 3.12 times SDE. The executor fee calculator now covers all 50 states and DC with each state’s own rule: it had Florida’s statutory 3% as unset and Texas as a flat “up to 5%”.
The rental depreciation calculator now works out the tax when you sell: depreciation recapture at your ordinary rate but no more than 25%, on the depreciation actually allowed, instead of 25% of the whole building value. The gift tax calculator handles several recipients, gift splitting, a non-citizen spouse ($194,000 in 2026) and 529 superfunding, and says whether Form 709 is due. The SIMPLE IRA calculator adds the $22,250 limit for ages 60 to 63 and the higher limits at employers with 25 or fewer employees; the Social Security calculator now works month by month, compares 62 with 70 and shows the chance of living past each break-even age (SSA 2023 period life table); the T-bill calculator uses Treasury’s own yield formula, which the old one got wrong for 52-week bills, and lists the latest auction rate for every term; and the DSCR calculator adds DSCR loans for rentals, rent divided by PITIA.
The military leave sell-back calculator no longer takes Social Security and Medicare off sold leave. A leave payment under 37 U.S.C. §501 is not basic pay, and for service members those taxes apply to basic pay only (26 U.S.C. 3121(i)(2)), so only income tax is withheld. An E-6 at 10 years selling 30 days now nets $3,712.41 of $4,759.50 after 22% federal withholding; the calculator used to take another $364.10 for FICA.
The military bonus calculator no longer takes Social Security and Medicare off a bonus. For service members those taxes apply to basic pay only (26 U.S.C. 3121(i)(2)), so a $20,000 enlistment bonus has $4,400 withheld for federal tax and nothing for FICA; the calculator used to take $5,930 and showed $1,530 too little take-home. It now adds your state’s tax under that state’s own rules for military pay, checked for all 50 states and DC (Georgia taxes a resident’s bonus at 4.99%; 14 states exempt active-duty pay), the combat zone exclusion, and a Navy, Air Force or Space Force Selective Reenlistment Bonus worked out from your multiple, with the 50% up-front payment and the anniversary installments.
The I bond and EE bond calculators now value a bond from its issue month, the way Treasury does, and match Treasury’s published value tables to the cent for every issue month. The I bond calculator used to project one rate for the whole term and ignored the fixed rate you entered; the EE calculator refused any bond bought before May 2005 and now covers every Series EE bond since 1980 and Series E since 1941. Both pages add a table of values by issue date: a $1,000 I bond bought in September 1998 is worth $5,235.60 in September 2026.
The military clothing allowance page now shows the full FY2026 DFAS chart and adds the Space Force. Navy chiefs were shown $1,425.60 a year because the special rate was added on top of the standard one; it replaces it, so the figure is $810.00 for men and $792.00 for women. Air Force women’s initial cash allowance is $532.57, not $0, and the Coast Guard row, which had copied the Navy figures, is gone because the Coast Guard pays its own monthly allowance. The house cleaning calculator has a new mode for cleaners pricing a job: labor hours by home size and cleaning type, your hourly rate, supplies, mileage at the IRS rate and self-employment tax, so a 2,000 square foot home cleaned every two weeks quotes at about $179.
The Oregon paycheck calculator now withholds the statewide transit tax, 0.1% of wages with no cap, alongside the 0.6% Paid Leave Oregon contribution: about $2.88 a pay period on a $75,000 salary paid every two weeks. Paycheck pages in states whose local taxes are only sales taxes, such as South Dakota, no longer suggest that local governments take a cut of your pay.
The numbers you type into a calculator are no longer passed to our analytics. Each calculator keeps your inputs in the page address so you can share a result, and our analytics tag used to record every change of that address; it now sees only the page you opened. The calories-per-step calculator now uses the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities value for walking at a moderate pace, so 10,000 steps at 155 pounds come to about 408 calories rather than 543, in line with the range its own FAQ gives, and the paycheck and cost-of-living pages for Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland, Delaware and Oregon now point out the local income taxes those states allow.
The student loan affordability calculator now uses the repayment terms that apply to federal loans taken out since July 1, 2026. Those loans no longer have a single 10-year standard plan: the Tiered Standard Plan sets the term by balance, 10 years under $25,000, 15 years up to $49,999, 20 years up to $99,999 and 25 years above that. A $35,000 balance at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52% now comes to $305.27 a month over 15 years, 6.7% of a $55,000 salary, where the calculator used to show $397.42 over 10 years; a switch still prices older loans on the 10-year plan.
The Medicaid eligibility calculator now explains the rules that start on January 1, 2027 for adults covered through the Medicaid expansion: 80 hours a month of work, school or community service unless you are exempt, and a check of your eligibility every six months instead of once a year. The safe withdrawal rate calculator now labels its four scenarios as the fixed returns they are (9%, 5%, 2% and −1% after inflation) instead of calling them percentiles, and the HELOC calculator makes clear that a cash-out refinance replaces your whole mortgage while the HELOC figures sit on top of your current payment.
The Amazon FBA fee calculator now uses Amazon’s 2026 US rate cards instead of the 2023 schedule. It works out the size tier and shipping weight from the package dimensions, applies the price band (under $10, $10 to $50, over $50), the 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge added on April 17, 2026, the storage rate for the item’s size and the tiered referral fee for clothing, and a switch shows the holiday peak rates that start on October 15. It also takes your product cost, so the profit it shows is real profit: a $29.99 item weighing 1.5 pounds in a 12 × 8 × 4 inch box pays $11.57 in fees and earns $10.42 a unit on an $8 product cost, where the old table showed $9.88 in fees.
The catch-up contribution calculator now gives governmental 457(b) plans the larger catch-up for ages 60 to 63, $11,250 in 2026, as it already did for 401(k) and 403(b) plans; a 61-year-old could previously see $32,500 as the limit instead of $35,750. The page also explains the new rule that makes catch-up contributions Roth-only if your 2025 wages from the employer sponsoring the plan were more than $150,000, and the separate three-year catch-up some 457(b) plans allow before retirement.
Thirty calculators that opened with blank fields, among them SNAP, unemployment, Medicaid, Section 8, balance transfer, title insurance, overdue invoices and the tile, flooring, roofing and deck estimators, now open on a realistic example, using the same numbers as the worked example on the page where there is one. Links that share a calculator’s inputs now load those values cleanly. The DoorDash calculator no longer shows a “tips” percentage that was based on an assumed $3 base pay, and the passer rating FAQ now uses the same rating bands as the calculator.
The vehicle registration fee estimator now uses each state’s real 2026 fees instead of a single made-up formula. Pick a state, the car’s age and its fuel type and it shows what a new $35,000 midsize sedan costs to register there each year, with the fees itemized, the one-time title fee, and the extra yearly fee for electric cars, plug-in hybrids and hybrids; for example about $567 a year in Los Angeles, $85 in Houston and $1,006 in Fairfax County, Virginia, where the county taxes the car’s value.
The EV savings calculator now counts the extra registration fee about 40 states charge electric cars in place of gas tax, from $50 a year in Hawaii to $270 in New Jersey; state pages fill in the local amount. The state pages for gas taxes, 529 plans and electric vehicles now show each state’s actual 2026 figures, from California’s 65.6¢ a gallon gasoline tax to New York’s $5,000 ($10,000 joint) 529 deduction.
The calorie calculators for cycling, running, swimming and the exercise comparison now use the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities, the reference their pages cite, instead of older or unsourced values. Running at 6 mph is 9.3 METs rather than 9.8, brisk walking 4.8 rather than 3.5, and cycling at 10–12 mph 6.8 rather than 6; the running calculator now follows the Compendium’s speed table smoothly instead of jumping in five steps, so a 5K at a 9:42 mile pace for a 143-pound runner comes to about 305 calories, not 319.
The freelance rate calculator overstated what you keep: its take-home line subtracted self-employment tax on your target income, but the rate it recommends earns more than that, and the tax follows. At the default $75,000 target the take-home after self-employment tax is $89,966, not $93,295. The net worth calculator’s example listed a $250,000 mortgage without the house, so it opened at minus $205,000; it now includes the home.
Health, fitness and food calculators now carry a medical disclaimer, and building calculators point you to local codes and licensed professionals, instead of every page telling you to consult a tax professional. We also restored 145 missing accents in the Spanish calculator labels.
The sales tax calculators for each state now open at that state’s average combined rate, from the Tax Foundation’s midyear 2026 table, instead of adding a flat 2% wherever a state has any local tax. Michigan opened at 8% although it has no local sales tax, and Georgia at 4% although no place there charges less than 6%; they now open at 6% and 7.56%. Washington, DC is at 6%, not the 6.5% we showed, and goes to 7% on October 1. The 15 Colorado city pages left out the transit and cultural district taxes (Denver is 9.15%, not 8.71%; Commerce City 9.75%, not 7.885%), and nine Louisiana city pages had the wrong local rate. Marking a purchase as groceries now follows each state’s rule, for example 2% plus local tax in Alabama, instead of removing the tax everywhere.
The corporate tax calculator charged every state’s top rate on every dollar and figured federal tax before subtracting the state tax, which companies deduct. It now uses the brackets in the 11 states that have them and New Jersey’s and New York’s size tiers, so a Maine corporation with $180,000 of taxable income owes $42,777, not $53,874, and a California one $50,370, not $53,712. Georgia’s rate is now 4.99% and Utah’s 4.45%, after this year’s cuts.
The EE savings bond calculator applied today’s 2.40% to a bond bought in any year since 1990. It now uses the fixed rate Treasury set for the month you bought it, from 3.70% in mid-2006 down to 0.10% for most bonds bought from late 2015 to October 2022, so a $1,000 bond from January 2021 is worth about $1,006 today, not $1,140. Bonds bought before May 2005 earn variable rates and are pointed to Treasury’s own calculator.
The insulation calculators now work out energy savings from the heat that stops flowing through the area, using your climate and what is already there. The insulation calculator used to show about $300 a year for R-19 whatever the size of the job; 400 square feet over an empty wall now saves about $166 a year, and the same job over old insulation about $32. The attic calculator’s rule of thumb overstated top-ups: bringing 1,500 square feet from R-19 to R-49 saves about $88 a year in a mixed climate, not $138.
The Georgia and Wyoming minimum wage pages said the state wage was “$-2.10 above the federal minimum wage.” Both states’ laws still say $5.15, but the federal $7.25 applies to nearly every employer, and every state page now shows that. We also updated the city and state notes for Chicago ($17.05 since July 1), Seattle ($21.30), Santa Fe ($15.40), Missouri, Massachusetts and Nebraska, which will raise its wage 1.75% a year from 2027.
Smaller fixes: the refinance calculator now works out your current payment from the balance, rate and months left; the PSLF calculator has separate IBR options for newer (10%) and older (15%) borrowers; the HVAC calculator had its hot and cold climate figures the wrong way round; the employee cost calculator stops Social Security at the $184,500 wage base; the staking calculator no longer compounds a rate that is already an APY; and the buyer closing cost calculator asks for your mortgage rate instead of assuming 6.5%.
Every state income tax calculator has now been checked against its state’s 2026 withholding guide or statute, and nine more were off. Wisconsin, Vermont and Minnesota were still using brackets from 2023 or 2024, and Wisconsin never phased out its standard deduction, so a married couple on $150,000 was shown about $940 too little. Alabama and Missouri both let you deduct federal income tax you paid, which the calculators ignored; Alabama was overstating a $75,000 salary by about $360. Connecticut’s two lowest rates have been 2% and 4.5% since 2024, not 3% and 5%; Idaho’s 5.3% applies only above a zero band and its 2026 standard deduction is $16,100; Rhode Island’s deduction rose to $11,200; and Massachusetts now subtracts the $2,000 deduction for Social Security and Medicare and applies its 4% surtax on the income tax page, where it was missing.
The tax withholding checker was telling some people they had missed the underpayment-penalty safe harbor when they had not: it demanded 100% of this year’s tax, but the rule is 90% of this year or 100% of last year (110% at higher incomes). You can now enter last year’s tax. The debt payoff planner now puts getting your full employer 401(k) match right after minimum payments, ahead of paying off debt, since a 50–100% match beats any interest rate.
State income tax is now current for 2026 in five more states whose laws changed. Georgia cut its rate to 4.99% and raised the standard deduction to $15,000 ($30,000 for couples) in May, backdated to January, so a $75,000 salary owes about $2,994, not $3,270. Hawaii’s wider brackets under Act 46 take its bill on $75,000 from about $4,687 to $3,896. South Carolina’s new $15,000 deduction shrinks as income rises and is gone by $95,000 for a single filer, which the calculator was ignoring; New York lowered its five bottom rates to 3.9%–5.9%; and Ohio’s schedule adds a fixed $332 once income passes $26,050. Utah’s taxpayer credit, New Jersey’s personal exemption (it was being counted twice) and Nebraska’s 2026 standard deduction are also fixed.
Paycheck calculators now take out the state disability and paid-leave contributions workers pay in 13 states — 1.3% for California SDI, 0.19% plus 0.23% in New Jersey, New York’s disability and paid family leave, and the paid-leave premiums in Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota and Maine, each with its 2026 wage cap. Until now the pages said these came out of your check while the calculator left them out, so take-home pay in those states was overstated. Maryland counties with graduated local rates (Anne Arundel, Frederick) are now charged band by band rather than at their top rate.
The FIRE calculator kept adding savings to the portfolio for decades after the year you retire, projecting $170 million by age 110; it now draws the portfolio down to pay your expenses from that year on and tells you if it would run out. The Social Security estimator now rounds down the way SSA does, which lowers some estimates by a dollar.
The federal estate tax calculator was undercharging every estate above the $15 million exemption, and the state part was guessing. It ran the amount over the exemption through the tax brackets from 18% upward, but the exemption works as a credit, so every dollar above $15 million is taxed at 40%: a $20 million estate owes $2,000,000, not the $1,945,800 it showed. The gift tax calculator had the same error. The state estimate multiplied everything above the state exemption by the state’s top rate — 35% in Washington, 16% in New York — where each state actually uses its own graduated schedule; in New York a $7.5 million estate owes about $386,430, not $24,000. All thirteen state schedules have now been built from the 2026 state forms and statutes (including New York’s credit phase-out, the Massachusetts and Rhode Island credit tables and Illinois’ interrelated calculation), Rhode Island’s threshold is updated to $1,838,056, and state tax is deducted before the federal tax as the law allows. The estate page also said six states have an inheritance tax; Iowa repealed its tax from 2025, so it is five.
The ski DIN calculator was reading from a table that does not exist. It placed skiers on an invented twelve-step scale and returned a release setting of 3.5 for a 170-pound, 5-foot-10 intermediate skier, where the standard chart gives 6.5. It now uses the ISO 11088 release-value chart exactly as the major binding makers print it — skier code from weight and height, one row down for Type II and two for Type III, one row up at 50 and over, and the boot sole length column — and the page no longer cites an “ISO 11088:2026” edition (the current one is 2023) or an accident statistic we could not trace. Have a certified technician set and test your bindings either way.
The SALT deduction calculator added your state income tax and your sales tax together, but the law lets you deduct one or the other, whichever is larger. It also had no income field, so the phase-down of the $40,400 cap above $505,000 of income, advertised in its own title, never applied; enter your MAGI now and the cap shrinks by 30% of the excess, to no less than $10,000. The travel insurance calculator multiplied the total cost of the trip by the number of travelers, so two people sharing a $5,000 trip were quoted $1,100 instead of $550.
State property tax rates now come from the same source as the national figure they are compared with: the 2024 American Community Survey, as published by the National Association of Home Builders, where the national average is 0.89% of home value. The state figures had come from an older source that ran higher in 47 states — New Jersey showed 2.23% against 1.68%, Connecticut 1.98% against 1.36% — so most states looked further above average than they are, and Washington, at 0.74%, turns out to sit below it.
Smaller corrections: the beer brewing calculator was showing about 1,300 calories for a 12-ounce beer and now shows about 164; the price elasticity calculator now uses the midpoint method its page describes; the business mileage comparison quoted a 69.5-cent rate that was never official (it is 76 cents from 1 July 2026, 72.5 cents before) and had the first-year switching rule backwards in its FAQ; Philadelphia’s wage tax is 3.735% for residents from 1 July 2026; the back-to-school and propane pages now describe the calculators they sit on, with National Retail Federation and EIA figures.
The life insurance needs calculator was quoting premiums about twelve times too high. It applied a rate meant per year, roughly 50 cents to a dollar per $1,000 of cover, to every month, so $1.22 million of cover for a healthy 35-year-old showed $793 a month where the same assumption gives about $92. The naturalization fee calculator charged everyone the full $760 and never showed the $380 reduced fee for households between 150% and 400% of the poverty guidelines; it now shows which of the three fees applies, and the $710 fee for filing online. Its explanation still added an $85 biometrics fee that USCIS folded into the filing fee in April 2024. The retirement readiness calculator compared savings grown at a 7% nominal return for decades with a target income in today’s dollars, which flattered everyone; it now projects in today’s dollars with an inflation setting, and its text no longer describes a Monte Carlo simulation it never ran. Unemployment maximums for Washington ($1,208) and Iowa ($644 before dependents) are on the figures in force for claims from 5 July, Louisiana’s pages now describe its income tax as the flat 3% it has been since 2025, the refund timeline accounts for the Treasury’s phase-out of paper refund checks, and federal student loan examples use the 2026-27 rates of 6.52% for undergraduates and 8.07% for graduate students.
North Dakota’s income tax was being charged as a flat 1.95% on everything above the standard deduction, although the state has taxed the first slice of income at 0% since its 2023 reform. For 2026 a single filer pays nothing on the first $49,575 of North Dakota taxable income, 1.95% up to $250,400 and 2.5% above that, so a $75,000 salary owes about $182, not the $1,149 the calculator showed, and a $60,000 salary owes nothing. The state paycheck pages had a related shortcut: the sentence about a $60,000 salary multiplied it by the state’s top rate; it now runs the same calculation as the calculator. North Dakota’s maximum unemployment benefit fell to $800 a week for claims from 5 July. And the business insurance calculator now prices workers’ compensation from what employers actually pay according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about $560 a year per full-time restaurant worker and $2,290 in construction, where it had used $2,200 and $4,500.
The Roth versus Traditional calculator was picking the wrong account. It compared a Roth contribution with a Traditional one of the same size but only partly counted the tax the Traditional deduction saves, so with a 24% bracket today and 22% in retirement it called the Roth the winner even though its own break-even line said 24%. It now compares the two at the same take-home cost, and Traditional wins whenever your retirement rate is lower. The AMT lookup was treating regular tax as a flat 24% of income; you can now enter the figure from your return, or it estimates it from the 2026 brackets. The dividend calculator held the share price flat while the dividend grew, which by year 30 implied a yield of over 21% on the same price; it now assumes the price grows with the dividend. IRA and 401(k) pages across the site now show the 2026 limits, $7,500 for an IRA ($8,600 from age 50) and $32,500 for a 401(k) from age 50, and fuel-cost examples use current gas prices, which the Energy Information Administration put at $4.48 a gallon nationally in the third week of September.
The pension survivor and alimony calculators were computing something other than what their own pages described. The survivor calculator gave the survivor a share of the unreduced pension, which is the federal FERS rule, while charging a flat 5%, 8% or 12% however old either spouse was, and what it called a break-even was just the survivor payment divided by the monthly reduction. It now asks for both ages. For private and most public plans it prices the joint-and-survivor option as the actuarial equivalent of the single-life pension, as IRC §417 requires, and pays the survivor a share of the reduced amount: for a retiree of 65 and a spouse of 60 the 75% option costs about 15%, not the 18% the example claimed. For FERS it applies the fixed 10% or 5% reduction and pays 50% or 25% of the unreduced annuity. The break-even now uses both life expectancies. The alimony calculator described the AAML guideline, 30% of the higher income minus 20% of the lower, but ran a percentage of the income difference, and its example left out the rule that the lower earner may not end up with more than 40% of the couple’s combined income: on $120,000 and $40,000 the guideline gives $24,000 a year, not $28,000. The guideline with its cap is now the default, and the text on how long support lasts matches what the calculator does.
State income tax now counts personal exemptions the way each state does. Until this change every state’s exemption was a single figure applied once, so married couples filing jointly got half of what the law allows almost everywhere, and Kansas was still using $2,250, the amount it replaced in 2024 with $9,160 for a single filer and $18,320 for a joint return. Nebraska, Illinois, Rhode Island and Vermont are on their 2026 amounts; Connecticut, Ohio, Maryland, Maine, Illinois, Rhode Island and California now reduce or remove the exemption at the incomes their laws set. Maine is on its 2026 brackets and standard deduction, including the new 2% surcharge on taxable income above $1 million. The charitable donation calculator applies the 2026 rule that only gifts above 0.5% of income are deductible for itemizers, and its FAQ no longer says non-itemizers get nothing: from 2026 they can deduct up to $1,000 of cash gifts, $2,000 for couples. Roth IRA pages were quoting income limits $2,000 too high; the 2026 phase-out runs from $153,000 to $168,000 for single filers and $242,000 to $252,000 for couples. And state property tax pages now compare against a single national average, 0.89% of home value from the 2024 Census survey, instead of 1.1% in one place and about 1% in another.
The pension versus lump sum calculator was steering people toward the lump sum no matter what. It set the pension payments you would have spent against a lump sum left untouched to grow, so at its own defaults it called the lump sum better by $871,456 — yet $500,000 paying the same $3,000 a month, rising 2% a year, at a 6% return runs out at age 82, before the life expectancy of 85 it assumed. It now draws the lump sum down month by month to pay exactly what the pension would, and the break-even age is when that money runs out. The LLC versus S-Corp calculator described a 20% qualified business income deduction it never applied; with it, the default S-Corp saving drops from $4,405 to $2,582, because the salary earns no deduction. The IRS penalty calculator now takes the failure-to-file charge down to 4.5% in months the failure-to-pay charge also runs, as the tax code requires, and uses the $525 minimum for returns due in 2026. Delaware’s pages said the state had no paid family leave program, although contributions began in 2025 and benefits on 1 January 2026, while the Maryland, DC and Vermont paycheck pages claimed a paid-leave deduction that none of them takes from a 2026 paycheck. State pages for Wisconsin, Maine, Delaware and New Mexico were printing top tax rates like 7.6499999999999995%.
Oregon’s income tax page was overstating the bill by more than $900 on a $75,000 salary ($5,993 against the correct $5,055). It used the 2024 brackets and last year’s standard deduction, skipped the subtraction for federal income tax that Oregon allows (up to $8,750 in 2026, phased out between $125,000 and $145,000 of income for single filers), and took the $263 personal exemption credit off income instead of off the tax. All four are now on the 2026 figures from the Oregon Department of Revenue. The same credit-versus-deduction mix-up affected Arkansas, California, Delaware, Iowa and Nebraska by smaller amounts and is fixed there too. Separately, the state bracket tables were rounding rates to one decimal, so Oregon’s 4.75% showed as 4.8% and Connecticut’s top 6.99% as 7.0% on 20 state pages; rates now print exactly.
Several pages were quoting last year’s federal limits in their text while the calculators beside them used this year’s. The jumbo mortgage page still said the conforming loan limit was $806,500 (it is $832,750 for 2026), the FHA page gave the 2025 floor and ceiling ($541,287 and $1,249,125 now apply) and the reverse mortgage FAQ used the old HECM limit. The SSI page showed three different maximum benefits in three places — $994, $972 and $967 — and only the first is the 2026 figure, with $1,491 for couples; the special needs planning calculator was still on 2024’s $943. Three retirement pages gave the average Social Security retirement benefit as $1,970, $1,980 or $2,050 “projected” for 2026, where SSA’s published January 2026 average is $2,071.
Oregon’s minimum wage rose to $15.55 an hour on 1 July ($16.80 in the Portland metro area, $14.55 in non-urban counties) and Alaska’s to $14.00 on the same day, and both state pages had stayed on the old rates. The itemized deduction calculator now applies two 2026 rules it was missing: the $40,400 SALT cap shrinks by 30% of income above $505,000, down to $10,000, and charitable gifts only count above 0.5% of AGI. Its worked example had also added $5,000 of medical bills in full, ignoring the 7.5% of AGI floor its own FAQ describes. The COBRA page now uses KFF’s 2025 employer premium survey ($9,325 single, $26,993 family a year) in place of figures from 2023, and the college cost calculator uses the College Board’s 2025-26 tuition averages; its out-of-state figure had been more than $6,000 too low.
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