The Tax-Calculator simulates the US federal individual income tax system. In conjunction with micro data that represent the US population and a set of behavioral assumptions, the Tax-Calculator can be used to conduct revenue scoring and distributional analyses of tax policies. The Tax-Calculator is written in Python, an interpreted language that can execute on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Results will change as the underlying models improve. A fundamental reason for adopting open source methods in this project is so that people from all backgrounds can contribute to the models that our society uses to assess economic policy; when community-contributed improvements are incorporated, the model will produce different results.
At the moment there are two ways to start using the Tax-Calculator.
The first way is install the Tax-Calculator on your computer. Do this by following the instructions in our Contributor Guide.
The second way is to access the Tax-Calculator through our web application, TaxBrain.
Conda taxcalc packages are created for every release of the Tax-Calculator.
We use them to install taxcalc on Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances that
run the TaxBrain web application. You can get the latest release of the
Tax-Calculator to run on your computer via the command
conda install -c ospc taxcalc. Note that this package does not include
a micro data set that represents the US population.