1099 / Self-Employed Tax Calculator
Work out your 2026 1099 take-home pay after federal income tax and the 15.3% self-employment tax, with real per-bracket math — not a flat-rate guess.
Understanding Your 1099 / Self-Employed Take-Home Pay
Self-employment income is taxed differently from a paycheck, and it's easy to underestimate what you'll actually keep. This calculator works out your real 2026 take-home pay from 1099 or freelance income after both federal income tax and the 15.3% self-employment tax — not a flat percentage guess.
Self-employment tax stands in for the Social Security and Medicare that an employer would otherwise split with you on a W-2 paycheck. For 2026, that's 15.3% of net self-employment income up to the $184,500 Social Security wage base, dropping to a Medicare-only 2.9% above it, plus an extra 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax once total earnings pass $200,000. On top of that, federal income tax still applies using the same 2026 brackets everyone else uses, after the $16,100 standard deduction for a single filer.
What isn't included in this federal-only figure
- State income tax — every state (except the handful with none) adds its own layer on top of the federal figures here
- The section 199A Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction, worth up to 20% of qualified business income and made permanent by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which depends on your entity type and income level and isn't modeled in this engine
- The above-the-line deduction for half of your self-employment tax, which the real IRS Form 1040 process lets you subtract before calculating income tax — leaving this tool's income-tax figure a slight overestimate of your true 2026 liability
- Business expenses and deductions specific to your trade, which reduce your net self-employment income before any of this math applies
