Your federal income and payroll taxes split by what the government spent in fiscal year 2026
Updated October 2026
Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statement reports federal outlays by budget function. Your share for each function is your tax × (that function’s outlays ÷ total net outlays). Example: Social Security outlays of $1,667.1 billion are 22.54% of $7,395.8 billion, so $13,000 of tax maps to $13,000 × 0.2254 = $2,930. The optional trust-fund split sends your payroll tax to the programs it funds instead: 6.2 of every 7.65 percentage points of an employee’s FICA tax is Social Security and 1.45 is Medicare, and only your income tax is spread across everything else.
| Function | FY2026 outlays ($ billions) | Share | FY2025 ($ billions) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Security | 1,667.1 | 22.54% | 1,580.7 |
| Medicare | 1,072.6 | 14.50% | 996.7 |
| Net Interest | 1,051.8 | 14.22% | 970.4 |
| Health | 1,025.6 | 13.87% | 978.9 |
| National Defense | 965.2 | 13.05% | 916.6 |
| Income Security | 694.2 | 9.39% | 701.6 |
| Veterans Benefits and Services | 416.2 | 5.63% | 377.2 |
| Transportation | 142.9 | 1.93% | 145.8 |
| Administration of Justice | 109.9 | 1.49% | 85.2 |
| Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services | 107.6 | 1.45% | 71.0 |
| Community and Regional Development | 62.4 | 0.84% | 84.5 |
| Natural Resources and Environment | 57.1 | 0.77% | 88.3 |
| Agriculture | 52.6 | 0.71% | 49.4 |
| International Affairs | 48.0 | 0.65% | 45.2 |
| General Science, Space, and Technology | 39.9 | 0.54% | 42.1 |
| General Government | 32.3 | 0.44% | 34.5 |
| Energy | 21.0 | 0.28% | 20.9 |
| Commerce and Housing Credit | -15.5 | -0.21% | -28.6 |
| Undistributed Offsetting Receipts | -155.0 | -2.10% | -150.2 |
Two lines are negative in Treasury’s table, Commerce and Housing Credit and Undistributed Offsetting Receipts; they reduce the net total, and the calculator shows your share of them as negative amounts so the pieces add up to what you paid.
| Household | Largest three uses |
|---|---|
| $8,000 income tax + $5,000 payroll tax, FY2026 | $2,930 Social Security, $1,885 Medicare, $1,849 Net Interest |
| Same, payroll taxes to their trust funds | $4,052 Social Security, $1,807 Net Interest, $1,762 Health |
| Retiree paying $2,000 income tax | $451 Social Security, $290 Medicare, $284 Net Interest |
| High earner, $50,000 income tax | $11,271 Social Security, $7,252 Medicare, $7,110 Net Interest |
| $8,000 + $5,000, FY2025 shares | $2,931 Social Security, $1,848 Medicare, $1,815 Health |
Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes are credited to trust funds that pay those programs’ benefits, so the trust-fund option is closer to how the money is accounted for. Income taxes, corporate taxes and other receipts go to the general fund. In FY2026, individual income taxes brought in $2,845.5 billion and employment and retirement taxes $1,754.3 billion of $5,403.3 billion in total receipts.
Net interest, $1,051.8 billion in FY2026, is the third-largest line. Outlays exceeded receipts by $1,992.5 billion, so about 27 cents of every dollar spent was borrowed. A tax receipt therefore shows how your taxes line up with spending; it cannot show which dollars were borrowed. The national debt calculator puts the debt itself in per-person terms.
Figures are from the Monthly Treasury Statement for September 2026, Table 9, fiscal-year-to-date column (the full fiscal year from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026), retrieved from Treasury’s Fiscal Data API on October 22, 2026. The FY2025 column is the same table’s prior-year column. These are outlays (cash spent), which differ from appropriations and from projections.
It does not compute how much tax you owe; use the tax and paycheck calculators for that. It covers federal taxes only, not state and local taxes, and it does not include the employer half of payroll taxes unless you add it. The split is an accounting illustration: no individual’s taxes are earmarked to specific programs other than payroll taxes to their trust funds.
Using withholding instead of tax owed. Use the total tax on your return (and the payroll tax on your W-2), not your refund or balance due.
Comparing to budget requests. Proposals and appropriations differ from what was actually spent.
Forgetting the borrowed share. Spending was larger than all taxes combined.