Jacob McEwen

Jacob McEwen holds a master's degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins University and founded NumbersLab, the small studio behind TakeHomeTax and its sister calculators. He designs and codes every calculator on this site himself, and writes the explanatory articles and state profiles that accompany them.

He is not a CPA, enrolled agent or financial adviser, and nothing on this site is personalized tax advice. His approach is an engineer's: start from the primary source — the IRS revenue procedure that sets each year's brackets, the state revenue department's published rate schedules, the Social Security Administration's wage base — encode it exactly, and show the work. Every calculator page names the specific figures and sources it uses, and the state pages print the actual 2026 bracket tables rather than a summary rate.

When the law changes, the figures change here: the 2026 federal brackets and standard deduction come from Revenue Procedure 2025-32, the 2026 retirement-plan limits from IRS Notice 2025-67, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provisions — the senior deduction, the overtime and tips deductions, the raised SALT cap — are reflected where they apply. Corrections are logged under the corrections policy.