✅ Current for tax year 2026
Self-employment tax is the one tax every 1099 worker owes regardless of deductions, credits, or how the rest of your return shakes out. This calculator isolates just that number — Social Security and Medicare — so you can see it clearly, separate from your income tax.
Your 2026 self-employment tax
This is self-employment tax only (Social Security + Medicare) — it does not include federal income tax. For your full tax picture and a suggested quarterly payment, use the 1099 & quarterly tax calculator. General information, not tax advice.
Data sources for this calculator (2026 figures):
- IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 — 2026 federal income tax brackets and standard deduction
- Social Security Administration, 2026 COLA release — 2026 Social Security wage base ($184,500)
What self-employment tax actually is
It’s 15.3% of most of your net income: 12.4% for Social Security, up to the $184,500 wage base for 2026, and 2.9% for Medicare with no cap. As a W-2 employee, your employer pays half of this automatically; as a 1099 worker, you pay both halves yourself, which is exactly why this number often surprises people the first year they freelance.
How to use it
- Enter your net self-employment income — after business expenses, not your gross revenue.
- Add other W-2 wages if you also have a regular job — it affects how much of the Social Security wage base is still available to your self-employment income.
What this number doesn’t include
This is self-employment tax only — it doesn’t include federal income tax, which is calculated separately and depends on your filing status, deductions, and the standard deduction. Half of your self-employment tax is actually deductible when calculating that income tax, which softens the total bill slightly.
See your full picture
For your complete tax picture — self-employment tax plus income tax plus a suggested quarterly payment — use the 1099 & quarterly tax calculator. If you want to see how deductions change this number, try the tax deduction calculator.
A quick example
Say you netted $55,000 self-employed in 2026 with no other W-2 income. Self-employment tax applies to 92.35% of that net profit (a standard adjustment built into the calculation) — roughly $50,793 — at 15.3%, landing around $7,771. Split out, that’s about $6,298 for Social Security and $1,473 for Medicare. If you also earned $20,000 from a part-time W-2 job the same year, less of your self-employment income would be subject to the Social Security portion, since combined wages and self-employment earnings share a single $184,500 wage base for 2026 — though the 2.9% Medicare portion still applies to all of it, with no cap.
Why 92.35%, not 100%
Self-employment tax isn’t calculated on your full net profit — it’s calculated on 92.35% of it. This adjustment exists because a W-2 employee’s payroll tax is calculated on gross wages before the employer’s matching share, so this factor roughly equalizes the comparison by excluding the “employer-equivalent” portion of self-employment tax from the base it’s calculated on. It’s a small but real difference, and it’s automatically built into this calculator’s result.
The additional Medicare tax
High earners face one more layer: a 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax applies to self-employment income above $200,000 (single) or $250,000 (married filing jointly), on top of the standard 2.9% Medicare portion. It isn’t withheld the way payroll deductions are — it shows up when you file, so factoring it into quarterly estimates matters if your net income is approaching those thresholds.
State self-employment tax?
Self-employment tax itself is a federal-only tax — there’s no separate state-level self-employment tax layered on top of it. States tax your self-employment income through their regular state income tax system instead, using whatever net profit figure your federal return establishes as the starting point.
Comparing this to what an employer would have paid
It’s a useful gut-check to compare your self-employment tax to what an equivalent W-2 employer relationship would have cost in payroll tax combined. If a $60,000 salaried job and $60,000 in self-employed income both produced the same 15.3% FICA/self-employment tax rate split differently — 7.65% from you and 7.65% from an employer in the W-2 case, versus the full 15.3% from you alone when self-employed — the total tax collected is actually similar in both scenarios; what changed is who pays which half. This is a useful reframe for anyone who feels self-employment tax is somehow an extra tax that employees don’t face: employees pay a similar total amount, it’s just split with their employer and less visible on a pay stub, since the employer’s half never shows up as money employees ever see or think about as “their” tax burden.