How can I calculate someone's income if I know the amount of taxes they pay?

Question

there still should be some tax bracket, say from 18 to 35 per cents; I

I just refuse to believe that it is so unceratin, and that it's not possible to come up with definite figures. What, some people pay 1 per cent off their income, and others - 60? That is nonsence.

Answer 1

IF you have the tax amount BEFORE credits, you can use the tax rate schedule to determine TAXABLE income. What you don't know, is the amount of deductions used to arrive at taxable income. It is also likely the final tax amount you have is AFTER credits. If that is the case, you would have to know the amount of any credits before you could determine taxable income. If your information is based on income tax withholding, you don't even know the amount of taxes they actually pay. These factors ignore the possibility of ATM (alternative minimum tax).

Edit: after reading some of the other answers, I remembered that without knowing the filing status, you can't even get taxable income from tax before credits.

If you had enough information to answer your question, you would probably already have the income to begin with.

Answer 2

Everyone here I would agree with. It is probably none of your business, otherwise you wouldn't be on here. With that being said, there is a big difference between a W-2 employee and a 1099 or Self Employed person. With a W-2 you could come reasonably close to the gross income based off pay period withholding but there are too many factors to be exact. How many exemptions, pre-tax witholding (401k, FSA, Insurance etc...). S/E and 1099 there would be no way since it depends on their year end write offs. Two different people that paid 10k in tax could be at 60k or 150k gross.

Answer 3

That depends....are you talking about the amount of taxes they pay per their tax return? or the amount of taxes they pay through withholding?

If it is per the tax return, you can work backwards from the tax amount to figure out the taxable income. However, in order to calculate their salary, you need to know their filing status, how many exemptions they get, whether they get any tax credits, what their itemized deductions are (if they itemize) and you must also know what other personal income they have.

If it is per the withholding, you need to know their filing status (married or single) for withholding purposes, as well as what their total number of withholding allowances is. If you know what their medicare withholding is, you can simply divide the medicare withholding by 0.0145 in order to figure out their medicare wages per pay period.

Answer 4

You can't calculate their income unless you also know a lot more about their finances. Two people could pay the same tax and have very different incomes if their filing status, dependents, deductions and adjustments were different.

Answer 5

There is no way to tell. how did the W4 get completed how many exemptions were claimed on it. Did they have any pre tax deductions. The only person who can answer this question is the person who earned the income.

Answer 6

The simple answer is- you can't. You would have to know what deductions they took throughout the year and tons of other information that would make it extremely difficult. For instance, my girlfriend made about 80% of my salary last year. But with my various situations last year, I ended up paying less in taxes than she did. So there is no easy way to tell. To be honest, if you are trying to "calculate" someone's salary, it's probably none of your business.

Answer 7

Why are you interested in somebody elses biz wats...! how much do you make?