“The top 1 percent of US taxpayers pay approximately 40 percent of all federal income tax revenue.”

For Tax Year 2022, taxpayers in the top 1 percent of the adjusted gross income (AGI) distribution (AGI of at least $682,577) accounted for 22.2 percent of total AGI and paid 42.3 percent of total individual income taxes. Taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent of the AGI distribution (AGI of less than $46,637) accounted for 10.4 percent of total AGI and paid 2.3 percent of total individual income taxes.

In 2022, the top 1% of earners — people with incomes $652,657 and above — paid 40% of total federal income taxes while earning 22% of total adjusted gross income. The top 50% of earners contributed 97% of federal income tax revenue.

The most recent data show that in 2022, the top 1 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $682,577 or more) accounted for 42.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes paid. Their share of total AGI was 22.2 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (AGI of $46,637 or less) earned 10.4 percent of total AGI and paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes.

In 2019, the latest year for which complete data are available, taxpayers in the top 1 percent of the income distribution paid 25 percent of all federal taxes. They paid a larger share of federal individual income taxes — about 38 percent — reflecting the progressivity of the income tax system.

“The newly released report covers Tax Year 2023 (for tax forms filed in 2024). The latest data shows that the top 1% of earners—those with incomes above $675,602—paid 38.4% of all federal income taxes. This represents a modest decline from the prior year and a continued normalization from pandemic-era highs, when the top 1% paid nearly 46% of all income taxes in 2021… By 2023, the top 1% paid 38.4% of all federal income taxes—twice as much as 56 years ago.”

Figure 3 shows that as a share of adjusted gross income (AGI), the top half of income earners paid 97.1 percent of federal income taxes. The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total income and paid 40.4 percent of all the income taxes. According to the National Taxpayers Union, the top one percent’s share of federal income taxes has more than doubled since the 1980s, reaching 40.4 percent in tax year 2022.

Brady (2024) finds that the top 10 percent of filers earned nearly half of all income in 2022 but were responsible for 72 percent of all income taxes paid. Furthermore, evidence shows that the top 25 percent of filers have consistently paid at least 73 percent of all income taxes paid since 1980. Table 2 measures how much the average person in each income bracket receives for each dollar paid in taxes… There is clear evidence that the average tax burden increases as income increases. High-income earners pay a disproportionate share of the tax burden while receiving much less direct federal transfers than low- and middle-income earners.

The Joint Committee’s top income tax rate is 34 percent for the special method that focuses on the top 0.01 percent of U.S. households and 28.7 percent for its standard percentile-based method focused on the top 0.1 percent, while Piketty, Saez, and Zucman’s top rate for the richest 400 families group is 23 percent. What’s more, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman find the top 400 families income group faces a 9.2 percent individual income tax rate… Using wealth records from Forbes to calculate a denominator that includes unrealized gains, ProPublica also found that the 25 richest Americans paid an average of 3.4 percent in federal individual income tax from 2014 to 2018. These approaches suggest that when unrealized gains are included, the effective tax rate on some of the very richest is far below what conventional tax-share statistics imply.

“Those at the very top of the income distribution experience a wide range of tax rates, with 80 percent of filers paying between 16% and 37%. For the top 1 percent, the share of total tax payments (including income, payroll, and other federal taxes) is substantially smaller than their share of federal individual income taxes alone. When aggregating all federal taxes, top earners’ tax share lies much closer to their share of national income than the oft‑cited statistic that they pay around 40 percent of ‘income taxes’ suggests.”

A recent report by the Tax Foundation sheds some interesting light on the distribution of the tax burden in the United States. Among their findings, based upon IRS data for 2022: • The top 1% of taxpayers, those with income above $663,164, paid 40% of the total income tax. Of course, those with the most income will pay the most tax, but in the case of the 1% their share of the income tax burden is almost double their share of the national income, 22%.

Across multiple official and independent analyses (IRS Statistics of Income, Congressional Budget Office, Treasury, Tax Policy Center), estimates of the share of federal individual income taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers typically fall in the mid-to-upper 30s to mid-40s percent range for recent years (roughly 2015–2023). This means that a claim that the top 1 percent pay “approximately 40 percent” of all federal income tax revenue is generally within the range found in these datasets, though exact figures vary by year, dataset, and whether projections or final data are used.