CRS Provides Fact Sheet on Individual Income Taxpayers
97-438 E
- AuthorsTalley, Louis Alan
- Institutional AuthorsCongressional Research Service
- Subject Area/Tax Topics
- Index Termsincome tax, individualsreturnsincome, statistics
- Jurisdictions
- LanguageEnglish
- Tax Analysts Document NumberDoc 97-11689 (2 original pages)
- Tax Analysts Electronic Citation97 TNT 81-59
97-438 E
April 10, 1997
CRS REPORT FOR CONGRESS
NUMBER OF FEDERAL INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAXPAYERS:
FACT SHEET 1
Louis Alan Talley
Research Analyst in Taxation
Economics Division
[1] This fact sheet provides the number of federal individual income tax return filers and estimates the number of taxpayers. Information is provided for both taxable and nontaxable returns, broken down by filing status. The information has been taken from the Internal Revenue Service's Statistics of Income -- 1993, Individual Income Tax Returns, which was revised in March 1996. The statistics provided in this fact sheet are for tax year 1993. 2 For most people, tax year 1993 returns are those due by April 15, 1994.
TABLE 1. NUMBER OF INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX RETURNS FILED, 1993
______________________________________________________________________
Number of Returns
______________________________________________________________________
Taxable 86,435,367
Nontaxable 28,166,452
Total 114,601,819
[2] Table 1 totals 114.6 million income tax returns as filed -- some by single people and some jointly with another person. Nearly 28.2 million of those returns were nontaxable. The requirement to file a return does not necessarily mean that income tax is owed for the year. For example, individuals may file a return (even though their gross income is less than the filing requirement) in order to have income tax previously withheld from pay refunded or in the case of the working poor to receive benefits under the earned income tax credit program. Individuals receiving tip income and self-employed persons (earning low dollar amounts) may be required to file a return to pay social security taxes or medicare taxes but may not be liable for income taxes.
[3] A breakdown by filing status for ALL returns and TAXABLE returns classified by filing status can be found in table 2.
TABLE 2. ALL RETURNS AND TAXABLE RETURNS CLASSIFIED BY FILING
STATUS, 1993
______________________________________________________________________
Taxable
Filing Status All Returns Returns
______________________________________________________________________
Returns of single persons 48,568,557 36,952,288
Returns of married persons filing jointly 48,298,687 40,742,883
Returns of married persons filing
separately, heads of households,
and surviving spouses 17,734,575 8,740,197
Total 114,601,819 86,435,368
[4] From these data CRS computed the number of nontaxable returns by filing status: 11.6 million returns filed by single individuals were not taxable; 7.6 million returns filed by married couples filing jointly were not taxable; and nearly 9 million returns filed by married persons filing separately, heads of households, and surviving spouses owed no income taxes.
[5] In the case of joint return, it is not possible to determine from the data if all income was earned by one spouse or if both spouses contributed to the reported earnings. Typically, estimators assume that a joint returns represents the income of two individuals and "impute" income to a non-working spouse. If we assume that a joint return represents the return of two individuals, we find the number of taxfilers for ALL returns is 162,900,506. Using the same assumption that a joint return represents the return of two individuals, but using only those returns that are TAXABLE results in a far lower number of persons who pay income taxes.
TABLE 3. ESTIMATED NUMBER OF TAXFILERS AND TAXPAYERS CLASSIFIED
BY FILING STATUS, 1993
______________________________________________________________________
Taxable
Filing Status All Returns Returns
______________________________________________________________________
Returns of single persons 48,568,557 36,952,288
Returns of married persons filing jointly 96,597,374 81,485,766
Returns of married persons filing
separately, heads of households,
and surviving spouses 17,734,575 8,740,197
Total 162,900,506 127,178,251
[6] It is this figure of 127.2 MILLION TAXPAYERS that is most frequently used for the number of individual income taxpayers.
FOOTNOTES
1 This report does not track particular bills or legislation. The author plans to update this report in the future to reflect changes in the number of tax returns filed.
2 While some preliminary individual income tax data for tax year 1995 are now available, that information is not used here because the information is for all tax returns filed and does not provide a breakdown of returns by filing status.
END OF FOOTNOTES
- AuthorsTalley, Louis Alan
- Institutional AuthorsCongressional Research Service
- Subject Area/Tax Topics
- Index Termsincome tax, individualsreturnsincome, statistics
- Jurisdictions
- LanguageEnglish
- Tax Analysts Document NumberDoc 97-11689 (2 original pages)
- Tax Analysts Electronic Citation97 TNT 81-59
