If you earn more, are you actually better off?
Covers: cliff, benefit cliff, raise, phase out, welfare cliff, better off, trap.
Open the Benefit Cliff Explorer tool →Most calculators answer what you owe or what you're owed. This one answers something else: what a household actually has, across a whole range of incomes.
For each income we compute your pay after federal income tax, FICA, and state income tax, then add the EITC, the Child Tax Credit you can actually use (all of the refundable part, and the rest up to the federal income tax it cancels), your ACA premium tax credit, and your estimated SNAP allotment. That sum is your total resources. Plotting it against gross income shows something a bracket table can't: the stretches where earning more leaves you with the same or less, because a credit phases out or an eligibility line is crossed faster than your wage grows.
The tax half of every figure here comes from your income and household alone, so five deductions new for 2026 — tips, overtime, car loan interest, being 65, and giving without itemizing — are not in it. A household any of them reaches keeps a little more at every income on the chart, though the cliffs themselves sit where the benefit rules put them rather than where the tax does.
What this leaves out is listed under every result, and it matters: housing assistance, childcare subsidies, WIC, LIHEAP, TANF, and state-only programs are not modeled here, and several of them have steeper cliffs than anything that is. Losing Medicaid is shown as a change in eligibility, never as a dollar amount, because we cannot price your coverage from public data and a made-up number would be worse than none.
This is an estimate from public data and the figures you enter, not an eligibility determination. Only the agency that runs a program decides who qualifies.
Free forever, with no account and no ads. Computed entirely on your device for U.S. taxes and benefits — nothing is ever sent anywhere. Educational information, not financial, tax, investment, or legal advice.