The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) introduced a series of federal individual income tax reforms. These included reducing marginal tax rates and adjusting tax brackets, nearly doubling the standard deduction, limiting the state and local tax deduction (SALT), and doubling the child tax credit (CTC), among others. The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) made permanent, expanded, and modified many of these provisions.

After accounting for all these changes to individual income taxes, some decreasing and others increasing taxes, how have tax rates on average changed since TCJA? This brief explores average effective tax rates and the distribution of the federal individual income tax burden after TCJA’s enactment.