Federal Tax Brackets 2025: Rates, Standard Deduction, and a Worked Example

The 2025 federal tax brackets are the seven income ranges the IRS uses to apply progressively higher rates to your taxable income. For tax year 2025, the rates are 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37%. Those rates have been stable since the 2017 tax law took effect, but the income thresholds that separate them move up a little every year for inflation. For 2025 the IRS raised the thresholds about 2.8% from 2024, which the agency announced in Revenue Procedure 2024-40.

The single most important thing to understand about the 2025 federal tax brackets is that they are marginal, not flat. A bracket rate applies only to the slice of income that falls inside that bracket’s range, not to your entire income. People hear “I’m in the 24% bracket” and assume the government takes 24% of everything they make. That’s not how it works, and the confusion costs people real money in bad decisions. The bracket you land in describes your top dollar, not your whole paycheck.

Walk through a single filer with $120,000 of taxable income for 2025. The 10% rate applies to the first $11,925. The 12% rate applies to income from $11,926 up to $48,475. The 22% rate applies from $48,476 to $103,350. Only the income from $103,351 to $120,000, that top sliver of roughly $16,650, gets taxed at 24%. So even though this person’s marginal rate is 24%, the vast majority of their income was taxed at 10%, 12%, and 22%. The 24% rate touches only the last few thousand dollars they earned.

Run the actual arithmetic on those 2025 federal tax brackets and the total comes to roughly $22,344. The breakdown: $1,192.50 at 10%, then $4,386 at 12% on the $36,550 in that band, then $12,072.50 at 22% on the $54,875 in that band, then about $3,994 at 24% on the top $16,650. Divide the $22,344 total by $120,000 and the effective rate is about 18.6%, far below the 24% marginal figure. That gap between the bracket you’re “in” and the rate you actually pay is the defining feature of a progressive system. The IRS lays out this mechanic plainly on its federal income tax rates and brackets page.

Three filing statuses cover most taxpayers, and the 2025 federal tax brackets differ across them. Single filers hit the 22% bracket at $48,476. Married couples filing jointly don’t reach 22% until $96,951, roughly double the single threshold, which reflects two incomes sharing one return. Head of household, available to unmarried people supporting a qualifying dependent, sits between the two: the 22% bracket starts at $64,851. The top 37% rate kicks in at $626,350 for single and head of household filers and $751,600 for joint filers. Notice the joint brackets are not always exactly double the single ones at the top, which is the remnant of what people call the marriage penalty at high incomes.

A common mistake is comparing your gross salary directly to the brackets. The 2025 federal tax brackets apply to taxable income, which is your income after subtracting the standard deduction or itemized deductions and any above-the-line adjustments like retirement contributions and HSA deposits. A single filer earning $64,225 in salary who takes the $15,750 standard deduction has $48,475 of taxable income, which means they sit exactly at the top of the 12% bracket, not the 22% bracket their salary alone would suggest. Skip that step and you’ll badly overestimate what you owe. This is the error that makes people think they pay far more tax than they actually do.

Another frequent error is forgetting that the 2025 federal tax brackets only cover federal income tax. They don’t include the 7.65% in Social Security and Medicare (FICA) taxes withheld from wages, and they don’t include state income tax. A New York City resident faces federal brackets, New York State brackets through the New York Department of Taxation and Finance, and a separate New York City resident tax on top. The federal number is only one layer of the total. For the full picture of how your federal return is assembled line by line, our guide on how Form 1040 works shows where each piece lands.

It helps to picture the brackets as a set of buckets you fill from the bottom. The first bucket holds income taxed at 10% and only overflows into the 12% bucket once it’s full. Income keeps pouring into higher buckets as you earn more, but the lower buckets stay full and stay taxed at their low rates forever. Nothing you earn ever re-prices the dollars beneath it. That mental model is the antidote to almost every bracket misunderstanding, and it’s why the question of which bracket you’re in is far less important than how your income is distributed across all of them.

Looking ahead, the 2025 federal tax brackets matter beyond this single filing season because of where tax law sits. The individual rate structure from the 2017 law was scheduled to expire after 2025, and Congress acted to address that. Knowing your 2025 brackets gives you a clean baseline to measure any change against, and it’s the foundation for any year-end planning move, whether that’s accelerating a deduction, timing a bonus, or deciding when to realize a gain. Get the brackets right and the rest of your planning rests on solid ground.

One more practical wrinkle on the 2025 federal tax brackets: tax software and CPAs read them the same way you should, from the bottom up, but the IRS instructions present them as a tax-on-the-prior-bracket-plus-a-percentage-of-the-excess formula. Both produce the identical answer. When you see a line like “$5,578.50 plus 22% of the amount over $48,475” in the IRS instructions, that is just the stacking done once and frozen so you do not have to recompute the lower brackets every time. If your software’s total does not match your hand math within a few dollars, the culprit is almost always a forgotten adjustment or a credit, not the brackets themselves, which are mechanical and unambiguous once your taxable income is fixed.

Your marginal tax rate is the rate that applies to your next dollar of income. Your effective tax rate is the total income tax you pay divided by your total income. Within the 2025 federal tax brackets, these two numbers are almost never the same, and your effective rate is always lower than your marginal rate. Mixing them up is the most common tax misunderstanding there is, and it leads otherwise smart people to make decisions that cost them money.

Start with the marginal rate. It’s simply the highest bracket your taxable income reaches. If you’re a single filer with $200,000 of taxable income in 2025, your income climbs through the 10%, 12%, 22%, and 24% brackets and lands in the 32% bracket, which starts at $197,301. Your marginal rate is 32%. That number answers one specific question: if you earn one more dollar, how much of it goes to federal income tax? In this case, 32 cents. It’s the rate that matters for decisions at the margin, like whether to take on extra work, defer a bonus, or make a deductible retirement contribution.

The effective rate answers a different question: across everything you earned, what share went to federal income tax? Take that same single filer with $200,000 of taxable income. Working through the 2025 federal tax brackets, the tax owed is roughly $40,303. Divide that by $200,000 and the effective rate is about 20.2%. So this person sits in the 32% marginal bracket but pays an effective federal income tax rate of just over 20%. The difference is enormous, and it exists entirely because the lower brackets did most of the lifting before any income reached 32%.

This distinction kills a persistent myth: that a raise can push you into a higher bracket and leave you worse off. It cannot. Because the 2025 federal tax brackets are marginal, a raise only taxes the new dollars at the higher rate. Every dollar you were already earning stays taxed exactly as it was. Suppose a $5,000 raise pushes $2,000 of your income from the 24% bracket into the 32% bracket. You pay 32% on that $2,000, which is $640, instead of 24%, which would have been $480. The difference is $160. You still keep the other $4,840 of the raise. You are unambiguously better off. The IRS explains the marginal structure on its rates and brackets page, and Revenue Procedure 2024-40 sets the 2025 thresholds.

Here’s a worked example that puts both rates side by side. A married couple filing jointly has $250,000 of taxable income in 2025. Their marginal rate is 24%, since the 24% bracket runs from $206,701 to $394,600. Their total tax is roughly $46,427. The effective rate is $46,427 divided by $250,000, or about 18.6%. So the couple is “in the 24% bracket” but pays an effective federal rate under 19%. If one spouse picks up a $10,000 consulting project, that whole $10,000 is taxed at the 24% marginal rate, costing $2,400, because it stacks on top of their existing income. The marginal rate, not the effective rate, is the right number for that decision, and it’s why the $10,000 project nets them $7,600 in their pocket, not the $8,140 the effective rate would falsely suggest.

A common mistake is using the effective rate for planning decisions or the marginal rate for budgeting. They serve opposite purposes. Use your marginal rate when you’re deciding whether an extra dollar of income or an extra dollar of deduction is worth it, because that’s the rate the next dollar moves at. A $6,000 deductible traditional IRA contribution saves you your marginal rate times $6,000, not your effective rate. For the couple above, that’s $1,440 in savings (24% of $6,000), not the roughly $1,116 their effective rate would predict. Use your effective rate when you want to understand your overall tax burden or compare year to year. Picking the wrong one quietly distorts the math and can make a good move look weak or a weak move look good.

The 2025 federal tax brackets also interact with capital gains in a way that confuses the two rates further. Long-term capital gains use their own 0%, 15%, and 20% schedule under IRS Topic No. 409, and they stack on top of ordinary income. So your marginal rate on wages and your marginal rate on a stock sale can be completely different in the same year. You might pay 32% on your last dollar of salary but only 15% on a long-term gain, because the gain rides on its own rate schedule even though it sits on top of your ordinary income. Our guide on reducing capital gains tax gets into how that stacking plays out and where the rate breaks fall.

There’s also a state layer that changes your true marginal rate. The 2025 federal tax brackets give you the federal marginal rate, but if you live somewhere with an income tax, your combined marginal rate is higher. A New York City resident in the 24% federal bracket might face a combined federal, state, and city marginal rate north of 35% once you add the figures from the New York Department of Taxation and Finance and the city resident tax. When you’re deciding whether a deferral or a deduction is worth it, the combined marginal rate is what actually drives the savings, not the federal piece alone.

Knowing both your marginal and effective rates under the 2025 federal tax brackets is what separates reactive filers from people who plan. Before year-end, you can look at your projected taxable income, see which bracket your next dollar lands in, and decide whether to accelerate income into this year or push it into next. That’s a decision you can only make well if you know your marginal rate cold and stop confusing it with the average you actually pay. The filers who treat these as the same number are the ones leaving the most on the table every April.

One last point that ties marginal and effective rates together: your effective rate is the right number to quote when someone asks “how much of your income goes to taxes,” and your marginal rate is the right number for “is this next move worth it.” Treat the 2025 federal tax brackets as a menu of marginal rates and your effective rate as the receipt at the end. A high earner in the 35% marginal bracket whose effective federal rate is 26% is paying a lot in absolute dollars, but the 35% figure is what governs whether a deductible move pencils out, while the 26% figure is what they should cite when comparing their burden to a prior year or to a peer in another state. Keep the two jobs separate and the math stays clean.

The 2025 standard deduction is the flat amount you subtract from your income before the federal tax brackets apply, and for most people it’s the biggest single reduction on their return. For tax year 2025 the standard deduction is $15,750 for single filers, $31,500 for married filing jointly, and $23,625 for head of household. Those figures come straight from the IRS in Revenue Procedure 2024-40 and are confirmed on the IRS standard deduction page.

The standard deduction sits between your gross income and the 2025 federal tax brackets. It comes off first. That ordering is what makes it so powerful. Because the brackets are progressive, every dollar the deduction removes is a dollar that would have been taxed at your highest rate. A single filer in the 22% bracket who takes the $15,750 standard deduction is shielding $15,750 from tax at the rates that would have applied to those top dollars. The deduction doesn’t just lower taxable income evenly; it carves out income from the top of your bracket stack, which is exactly where it does the most good.

Here’s a concrete look at how the 2025 standard deduction shifts the math. A single filer earns $60,000 in wages. Without any deduction, $60,000 of taxable income would run through the brackets and produce about $8,114 in tax. Subtract the $15,750 standard deduction and taxable income drops to $44,250. Now the tax is roughly $5,072. The deduction saved this filer about $3,042, and notice the saving rate: $3,042 saved on $15,750 deducted is about 19%, which reflects the 22% and 12% rates those top dollars would otherwise have been taxed at. That’s the proof that the deduction works against your highest dollars, not your average rate.

Taxpayers who are 65 or older or blind get an additional standard deduction on top of the base amounts. For 2025, the extra amount is $2,000 for single and head of household filers and $1,600 per qualifying condition for married filers. So a single filer who is 67 years old gets $15,750 plus $2,000, for a $17,750 standard deduction. A married couple where both spouses are over 65 adds $1,600 twice on top of the $31,500 base, reaching $34,700. These additions matter for retirees living on fixed incomes, because they push more income out of the 2025 federal tax brackets entirely, sometimes dropping a retiree’s marginal rate by a full bracket.

You choose between the standard deduction and itemizing, and you take whichever is larger. Itemized deductions include state and local taxes (capped at $40,000), mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and certain medical expenses above 7.5% of adjusted gross income. After the 2017 law nearly doubled the standard deduction, roughly 90% of taxpayers stopped itemizing because they couldn’t clear the higher bar. But this is one area where geography changes the answer. A homeowner in New York City with a large mortgage and significant property and state income taxes may still come out ahead itemizing, even with the $40,000 cap on state and local taxes documented by the New York Department of Taxation and Finance. Run both ways before you assume the standard deduction wins, because in high-tax cities the assumption is often wrong.

A common mistake is forgetting that the 2025 standard deduction can fully eliminate your federal income tax liability at lower income levels. A single filer earning exactly $15,750 has zero taxable income after the deduction, so they owe nothing in federal income tax, even though they had income all year. Another mistake is double-counting: you cannot take the standard deduction and itemize. It’s one or the other. And if you’re married filing separately and your spouse itemizes, you’re forced to itemize too, even if your standard deduction would have been larger, a trap that catches separated couples every season and can cost thousands if nobody catches it before filing.

The standard deduction also interacts with the 2025 federal tax brackets in planning. Because the deduction is fixed, the way to get more value from it is to control your taxable income through other levers: contributing to a 401(k) or traditional IRA, funding an HSA, or timing income. Each of those reduces income before the brackets, stacking with the standard deduction. A single filer who earns $75,000, takes the $15,750 standard deduction, and contributes $10,000 to a 401(k) gets taxable income down to $49,250, which keeps almost everything in the 12% and 22% bands. Our guide on tax tips covers the moves that work with the deduction rather than against it.

There’s a strategy called bunching that gets extra mileage out of the standard deduction. If your itemized deductions hover just below the standard deduction each year, you can group two years of charitable gifts or deductible expenses into one year, itemize that year to beat the standard deduction, then take the standard deduction the next year. Over two years you capture more total deduction than taking the standard deduction both times. It only works when you understand exactly where your itemized total sits relative to the 2025 standard deduction figure, which is why knowing the precise number matters.

Going forward, watch the standard deduction figure each fall when the IRS releases the next year’s inflation adjustments. It rises most years, which quietly lowers everyone’s effective rate even when the bracket rates don’t change. For 2025, the combination of a $15,750 single deduction and inflation-widened brackets means a meaningful share of income escapes tax entirely before the 2025 federal tax brackets ever apply. Treat the deduction as the first and largest step in any tax estimate, because that’s exactly what it is.

A final note on the 2025 standard deduction and timing: because the deduction is locked at $15,750, $31,500, or $23,625 for the year regardless of when in the year you earn your income, there is no penalty for earning unevenly. Someone who makes their whole income in the back half of the year gets the same deduction as someone who earns steadily. What you can control is whether your itemized deductions clear the standard deduction bar, and that is a year-by-year decision. If a big charitable year or a high-medical year pushes your itemized total past the standard deduction, take it; in a normal year, take the flat amount and move on. The deduction is the floor under your tax-free income, and the 2025 figures set that floor higher than it has ever been.

Calculating your tax with the 2025 federal tax brackets is a four-step process: find your taxable income, slice it across the brackets, multiply each slice by its rate, and add the pieces. It looks intimidating because of the seven rates, but it’s just stacking. Once you see one full example, you can do your own. The IRS confirms this stacking approach on its rates and brackets page, and the 2025 thresholds come from Revenue Procedure 2024-40.

Step one: find taxable income. Start with your total income, subtract any above-the-line adjustments (traditional IRA contributions, HSA deposits, half of self-employment tax, student loan interest), then subtract either the standard deduction or your itemized deductions. The 2025 standard deduction is $15,750 single, $31,500 joint, $23,625 head of household. What’s left is taxable income, and that’s the only number the 2025 federal tax brackets touch. If you start from gross salary and forget this step, every number after it will be wrong.

Step two: slice it. Lay your taxable income against the bracket thresholds for your filing status. Each bracket only taxes the income that falls inside its range. Think of it as pouring water into stacked buckets, where each bucket has its own rate and only the overflow reaches the next one.

Step three and four: multiply and add. Multiply each slice by its rate and sum the results. Let’s do a full married-filing-jointly example. A couple has $180,000 in combined wages and takes the $31,500 standard deduction, leaving $148,500 of taxable income. Apply the 2025 joint brackets:

• 10% on the first $23,850 = $2,385.00
• 12% on the next $73,100 (from $23,851 to $96,950) = $8,772.00
• 22% on the remaining $51,550 (from $96,951 to $148,500) = $11,341.00

Add those: $2,385 plus $8,772 plus $11,341 equals $22,498 in federal income tax. Their marginal rate is 22% and their effective rate is $22,498 divided by $180,000 of gross income, about 12.5%. The 2025 federal tax brackets did exactly what they’re designed to do: most of the income was taxed gently, and only the top slice reached 22%. If this couple had instead multiplied their full $148,500 by 22%, they’d have calculated $32,670 and overpaid their own estimate by more than $10,000.

There’s a shortcut the IRS publishes for higher incomes called the Tax Computation Worksheet, which collapses the stacking into a single multiply-and-subtract formula. For income under $100,000, you don’t even calculate; you look it up in the IRS tax tables, which are built directly from the 2025 federal tax brackets but round income to $50 ranges. That rounding is why your hand calculation might differ from the tables by a few dollars. Either method is correct. The tables are what most software uses for lower incomes, and they’re what the IRS will check your return against.

A common mistake is applying your top bracket rate to your entire taxable income. Someone with $148,500 of taxable income who multiplies by 22% gets $32,670 and panics. The real number, as shown above, is $22,498, more than $10,000 less. The brackets are marginal. Never multiply your whole income by one rate unless you’re entirely within the 10% bracket, where there’s only one rate to apply. This single error is responsible for most of the dread people feel about their taxes, because it inflates the bill in their head far beyond reality.

Another error is forgetting that self-employment income carries an extra layer. If your income comes from a Schedule C business rather than a W-2, you owe self-employment tax (15.3% on net earnings up to the Social Security wage base, then 2.9% Medicare above it) on top of the income tax from the 2025 federal tax brackets. You do get to deduct half of the self-employment tax above the line, which lowers the taxable income that feeds the brackets. The two taxes are calculated separately and both appear on your Form 1040. A freelancer netting $90,000 might owe roughly $12,700 in self-employment tax before the income tax brackets even enter the picture. Our guide on how Form 1040 works shows where each calculation lands on the actual return.

Don’t forget the layers the 2025 federal tax brackets leave out. They give you federal income tax only. Add FICA if you have wages, add self-employment tax if you’re a contractor, add state income tax wherever you live, and add city tax if you’re in a place like New York City that imposes one. A New York City single filer earning $100,000 might owe roughly $14,000 federal, plus FICA, plus around $5,000 to New York State per the state tax tables, plus a separate city tax. The federal calculation is the start, not the finish, and a New Yorker who plans around the federal number alone will be unpleasantly surprised at filing.

If you make estimated payments because you’re self-employed or have large untaxed income, the bracket calculation is also how you size your quarterly checks. Estimate your full-year taxable income, run it through the 2025 federal tax brackets, add self-employment tax and your state liability, then divide by four. Underpay and the IRS charges an underpayment penalty even if you settle up in April. The brackets aren’t just for the annual return; they drive the four payments you make along the way.

Once you can run the 2025 federal tax brackets by hand, you can do something more useful than file: you can plan. Project your taxable income before December, find your marginal rate, and decide whether to make a deductible contribution, harvest a loss, or defer income. The calculation isn’t just for filing season. It’s the tool that tells you what each financial move actually costs in tax, which is the whole point of doing the math in the first place.

A closing point on running the 2025 federal tax brackets yourself: the value is not in saving a tax-prep fee, since software is cheap and a CPA catches things a worksheet never will. The value is that once you can reproduce the number, you stop being surprised by it. You will know in October roughly what April holds, you will size your estimated payments correctly, and you will recognize when a withholding setting on your W-4 is off before it becomes a four-figure balance due. The brackets are the one piece of the tax code that rewards a few minutes with a calculator more than almost anything else, because they govern the largest line on most returns.

The 2026 federal tax brackets keep the same seven rates as 2025 (10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37%) but shift the income thresholds upward for inflation, just as the brackets do every year. The IRS released the 2026 figures in the fall of 2025 through its annual inflation-adjustment process, the same mechanism that set the 2025 federal tax brackets. The adjustment is automatic and built into the tax code under Section 1(f), so it happens regardless of any new legislation.

Why the brackets move every year comes down to one idea: bracket creep. Without annual adjustment, inflation would slowly push people into higher brackets even though their real purchasing power hadn’t grown. If your salary rises 3% just to keep pace with prices, you’re no richer, but a fixed bracket would tax more of your income at higher rates. Congress built inflation indexing into the brackets and the standard deduction specifically to prevent that silent tax increase. The 2025-to-2026 adjustment continues that pattern, widening each bracket so the same real income faces roughly the same real tax.

The mechanics matter for planning. Because the 2026 thresholds sit higher than the 2025 federal tax brackets, the same nominal taxable income generally produces slightly less tax in 2026 than in 2025. Suppose a single filer has exactly $103,350 of taxable income, the top of the 2025 22% bracket. In 2025 every dollar stays at 22% or below. In 2026, with the 22% bracket ceiling raised, that same income sits comfortably inside the 22% range with room to spare, and the wider lower brackets mean a bit more of the income is taxed at 10% and 12% rather than 22%. The dollar saving is modest on any single return, but across a career and across millions of taxpayers it’s the difference between a code that keeps pace with inflation and one that quietly raises taxes.

The standard deduction rises alongside the brackets. The 2025 figures of $15,750 single, $31,500 joint, and $23,625 head of household step up again for 2026 under the same indexing. That increase compounds the bracket adjustment: a larger deduction removes more income before the brackets apply, and wider brackets tax the remaining income more gently. Both moves push in the same direction, lowering the effective rate on a given real income year over year, which the IRS standard deduction page reflects with each annual update. So if your income is flat from 2025 to 2026, your tax bill should tick down slightly, purely from indexing.

A common mistake is assuming the 2026 federal tax brackets are identical to 2025 because the rates didn’t change. The rates are the same. The thresholds are not. If you reuse last year’s bracket numbers to estimate this year’s tax, you’ll overstate what you owe, because the thresholds moved up. Always pull the current year’s figures before running a projection. Tax software updates automatically, but anyone calculating by hand or using a spreadsheet has to swap in the new thresholds each year, or the 2025 federal tax brackets will quietly contaminate a 2026 estimate and throw off every downstream number, including your quarterly estimated payments.

Another mistake is ignoring the bigger legislative backdrop. The individual rate structure created by the 2017 tax law was scheduled to sunset after 2025, which would have changed the rates themselves, not just the thresholds. Had that happened, the 22% bracket would have reverted toward 25%, the 24% toward 28%, and so on, raising taxes for most filers. Congress addressed that expiration, so the rate structure carries forward, and the 2026 brackets continue the familiar 10%-through-37% pattern with inflation-adjusted thresholds. Watch the IRS newsroom each autumn for the official release; the figures are usually out by October or November for the following year. For a worked sense of how a return comes together once you have the right brackets, see our guide on how Form 1040 works.

Here’s a practical example of using the 2026 adjustment in planning. A married couple expects $400,000 of taxable income in 2026, which would put them near the bottom of the 32% bracket under the 2025 thresholds. Knowing the exact 2026 thresholds (rather than reusing the 2025 federal tax brackets) lets them decide precisely how much income to defer into the following year to stay under the 32% threshold, or whether a deductible contribution drops their marginal rate from 32% to 24%. Shifting $6,000 of income out of the 32% band and a $6,000 deductible contribution against the 32% band can together save them close to $4,000, but only if they’re measuring against the correct current-year line. Plan with the right brackets and the strategy holds; plan with last year’s and the math drifts.

The 2026 indexing also affects more than the headline brackets. The same inflation factor adjusts the capital gains rate breakpoints under IRS Topic No. 409, the income thresholds for various credits and phaseouts, and contribution limits for retirement accounts. So a clean read of the 2026 federal tax brackets is really the entry point to a whole set of adjusted figures that move together each year. If you plan around investments or retirement contributions, you need the full slate of 2026 numbers, not just the seven income brackets, to get your projection right.

The takeaway for the year ahead: the 2026 brackets are the 2025 federal tax brackets shifted up for inflation, the rates are stable, and the standard deduction grows too. Each fall, grab the new figures from the IRS, plug them into your projection, and use your marginal rate to time income and deductions. The adjustment is small in any one year, but planning around the correct numbers, rather than stale ones, is what keeps your estimates honest and your year-end moves effective.

One final framing on the 2026 adjustments: think of inflation indexing as a quiet raise the tax code gives you every year for doing nothing. If your real income holds steady, the widening brackets and growing standard deduction hand you a small tax cut annually. It will not change your life in any single year, but it is the reason a salary that merely tracks inflation does not slowly drown in higher rates. The job for any planner is simply to pull the correct year’s figures, because the indexing only protects you if your math uses the current numbers rather than last year’s. Stale brackets erase the very benefit the indexing was designed to give.