Wolters Kluwer Projects 2022 Federal Tax Brackets and Other Amounts

Wolters Kluwer has projected federal tax brackets and other inflation-adjusted amounts for the 2022 tax year. Highlights of projected 2022 amounts, including tax brackets for both ordinary income tax and capital gains tax, can be found at the following link.

See Wolters Kluwer’s 2022 Projections for Inflation-Adjusted Tax Brackets and Other Amounts

2022 Inflation Adjustments

Beginning with the 2018 tax year, most inflation adjustments replaced the Consumer Price Index with the Chained Consumer Price Index, as required by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The change in the calculation is highly technical, but the end result is much smaller increases in inflation adjustments. Despite that, the higher inflation seen during the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2022 has led the inflation-adjusted amounts to increase by more than in recent years.

On September 14, 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Consumer Price Index amounts for August 2021, enabling the calculation of 2022 amounts.

New Inflation-Adjusted Items under Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

In addition to changing the way inflation adjustments are calculated, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act also produced a number of new items to adjust annually. These include:

• Threshold amounts for the Section 199A qualified business income deduction, which for 2022 are projected to be $340,100 for joint filers and $170,050 for single filers
• Gross income ceiling for corporations and partnerships to use the cash method of accounting, which for 2022 is projected to remain $27,000,000

The personal exemption amount for 2022 is projected to be $4,450. While the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the personal exemption deduction, the personal exemption amount is still used in a number of instances, such as the qualifying relative test for head of household filing status, and a qualified disability trust’s deduction in lieu of a personal exemption.

Official Inflation Adjustments for 2022 Tax Year

The IRS should release official amounts for the 2022 tax year in late October or early November. Cost of living adjustments for retirement planning are based on a different set of numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and are typically released in late October. Amounts for the 2021 tax year were released on October 26, 2020.