Our new Marriage Bonus and Penalty calculator, despite all its Valentine’s Day finery, ignores the new 0.9 percent Medicare payroll tax hike buried in the 2010 health law. The extra levy affects only a few high-income couples but in very different ways. Lucky couples will collect marriage bonuses of up to $450. But those less [...]

Love is blind, says the adage, and that can be a good thing when it comes to taxes. That’s because married couples often pay a marriage penalty—a higher federal income tax bill than they would if they were single. But for most couples, marriage means a lower tax bill—a marriage bonus in tax-speak. Just in [...]

The federal income tax is not neutral when it comes to marriage. Get married and you and your spouse may pay less to Uncle Sam. Or you may pay more. It all depends. Whether you get a marriage bonus—your combined tax bill goes down—or suffer a marriage penalty—you pay more as a couple—depends on various [...]