Like many people, I run my numbers through free tax calculators a couple times a year — partly out of laziness, partly to sanity-check what I'm setting aside. Over the last year I noticed the answers were all over the map, especially for self-employment numbers. Same inputs, different tools, sometimes thousands of dollars apart from each other and from what I was actually seeing on my returns. The threads on r/tax, r/freelance, and r/llc_life from people running into the same thing told me it wasn't just my edge cases. Most of the popular tools either hadn't updated for the 2026 brackets, were still using the 2025 SS wage cap ($176,100 instead of $184,500), or were applying the QBI deduction in ways that don't match the §199A statute.
I'm a corporate attorney at a large firm. Before law school I spent about 5 years as a software engineer, which means I'm legally obligated to put disclaimers on everything (lawyer brain) AND constitutionally incapable of letting bad math sit on the internet (dev brain). So I built this:
IndieCalc — free, no paywall, no email gate, no data collection (all calculations run in your browser).
What I actually fixed that other tools get wrong:
- SS wage cap. $184,500 for 2026, not $176,100. Most calculators didn't update.
- The new SALT cap. OBBBA bumped it from $10K to $40,400 for 2026. The calculator auto-itemizes when your state income tax + property tax exceeds the standard deduction. If you live in CA, NY, NJ, or IL and earn over ~$200K, this is probably $5K–$10K of real money other tools are silently leaving on the table.
- S-Corp QBI math. Most "S-Corp savings calculators" give you the full 20% QBI deduction on your salary. That's wrong — only distributions qualify, not W-2 wages. And above the income threshold, non-SSTB QBI is capped at 50% of W-2 wages paid (§199A(b)(2)) — which most calculators don't model at all. Mine does. The result is usually $2K–$5K less in projected savings than competitors show, but it's the actual number.
- The QBI $400 minimum. OBBBA introduced this for active business owners with at least $1,000 of QBI. Most tools still zero out QBI above the SSTB phase-in.
- NIIT (3.8%) on portfolio income. If your investment income pushes you over $200K MAGI ($250K MFJ), you owe this. Almost no freelancer tool models it.
- CA conformity quirks. California state tax starts from federal AGI (which already deducts half-SE), so naive calcs that apply CA rates to gross SE income overstate state tax by ~$1K at $200K income. Fixed.
- NYC and Yonkers. NYC residents pay an additional 3–3.88% city tax. Yonkers residents pay a 16.75% surcharge on state tax. Both modeled.
Other stuff it does:
- Quarterly estimated payment breakdown with safe harbor calculation (90% / 100% / 110% rule)
- LLC vs S-Corp comparison with break-even income
- Freelance rate calculator (works backwards from target take-home to hourly rate)
- Business expense estimator showing actual dollar savings per deduction category
- Senior deduction phase-out, child tax credit phase-out, tip exemption (the OBBBA "no tax on tips" thing)
What it does NOT do:
- Replace a CPA. There are edge cases I don't cover — AMT for very high earners, NYC unincorporated business tax, multi-state apportionment, foreign earned income exclusion, complex S-Corp scenarios. There's a warning banner above $500K when AMT might bite, and I've tried to flag on the site any edge cases that are not covered, but please let me know if I've missed anything.
- Charge you anything. It's free to use, no paywall, no email gate.
- Track you. Every calculation runs locally in your browser; no analytics on inputs.
The math is verified against IRS publications, the OBBBA statute text, Tax Foundation 2026 brackets, and SSA wage base announcements. I ran ~23,000 automated test assertions across income levels, filing statuses, all 50 states + DC, plus hand-computed a variety of end-to-end scenarios.
Happy to answer questions about the tax logic or get yelled at if I got something wrong for your specific state. There's a "See an error?" button on every page that opens a pre-filled email — please use it or flag below. The whole point is for the math to be right.