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.
The Open Source Policy Center (OSPC) seeks to make policy analysis more transparent, trustworthy, and collaborative by harnessing open-source methods to build cutting-edge economic models.
The Tax Calculator is currently under development. Users should be forewarned that the taxcalc API (application programming interface) could change significantly, and the implementation is subject to wild change. Therefore, there is NO GUARANTEE OF ACCURACY. THE CODE SHOULD NOT CURRENTLY BE USED FOR PUBLICATIONS, JOURNAL ARTICLES, OR RESEARCH PURPOSES. The source code is currently available for testing purposes only.
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. Do this by emailing Matt Jensen about becoming a TaxBrain beta tester.
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 taxcalc package 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.