MAGI Calculator

Modified adjusted gross income ＝ adjusted gross income ＋ the items the provision you are reading adds back

adjustedGrossIncome

The figure the provision actually starts from, so this calculator takes it as given rather than deriving it — the previous page in this pair is the one that works it out, and its result is what belongs in this field. It can be negative in a year when a business loss outran the rest of your income, and this page will carry that through rather than refusing the input.

foreignEarnedIncome

Wages and self-employment income earned abroad that you excluded from gross income under the foreign earned income exclusion. It is the one item all three provisions below agree on, which is why it is worth knowing about even if you never look at the other two: if you claimed this exclusion, no version of MAGI will leave it out.

possessionExclusions

Income from a source within a United States possession that the law lets you exclude because you are a bona fide resident there. Only one of the three provisions adds it back, so this field is the fastest way to see that these definitions are not interchangeable — fill in a number here, and you have just described a taxpayer for whom two of the three thresholds use one figure and the third uses another.

phasedOutDeduction

The deduction whose own income phase-out is being measured — the number you took for it, not the amount left after the phase-out. Two of the three provisions add it back, because a deduction cannot be allowed to shrink the income figure that decides how much of it you may take. This is the one add-back that shows up on both sides of the calculation, which is why it is worth filling in rather than leaving at zero.

taxExemptInterest

Interest that is exempt from federal income tax, typically from municipal bonds. It never enters gross income, so it is never in AGI — and for most of the tax code that is the end of the story. One provision pulls it back in, which is why a portfolio of tax-exempt bonds can quietly move you across a threshold that has nothing to do with how much tax you paid.

socialSecurityNotTaxed

The portion of your Social Security benefits that was not included in gross income. Depending on your other income, anywhere from none to 85 percent of your benefits is taxable; this field wants the part that is not. Only the premium tax credit adds it back, and that provision is also the one where the threshold matters most for the people who receive it.

modifiedAdjustedGrossIncome

The result — the figure the provision you were reading compares against its threshold. Read it as provision-specific rather than as a single fact about you: the same taxpayer can have three different values here, and each of the three is the right one for the rule it belongs to.

totalAddBacks

The five fields added up. It is printed separately because it is the only part of this panel that came entirely from you rather than from the arithmetic, and because it is what moves when you change which provision you are looking at — the AGI you typed does not change at all.

adjustedGrossIncome

Echoed back so the two figures can be read side by side. Without it, the panel would show a total and a result with nothing to compare the total against, and you would have to remember what you typed in order to see how much the add-backs moved it.

addBackShare

The add-backs as a percentage of adjusted gross income. It is descriptive, not a bracket: it says how much of the step from one figure to the other was taken by the list you filled in. It can exceed 100 percent, which is not an error — a foreign earned income exclusion in a low-income year can easily be larger than the AGI it is added to.

Use it when a phase-out, a contribution limit or a credit asks for modified adjusted gross income and you already know which provision you are dealing with, because this page will not tell you. The Form 8962 instructions for the premium tax credit are the common case: they ask for a figure that starts from AGI and adds back foreign earned income, tax-exempt interest and the untaxed part of your Social Security. The retirement account contribution limits are the other common one, and they add back a different list, including the student loan interest deduction. Do not use it to find out what MAGI is in general — there is no such number. And do not use it to work out your AGI in the first place: that subtraction happens on the other page, and if you have not done it yet, this one is starting from a figure you do not have.

1. Default case: 83,000 plus two add-backs

   1. Add-backs: 2,000 ＋ 1,500 ＝ 3,500
   2. Modified figure: 83,000 ＋ 3,500 ＝ 86,500
   3. Add-backs as a share of AGI: 3,500 ÷ 83,000 × 100 ＝ 4.22%

   The 2,000 is the student loan interest deduction that the previous page subtracted to arrive at this AGI, and the 1,500 is interest that was never in gross income to begin with. Both are added back here, but not by the same provisions — the student loan interest deduction is added back when measuring the retirement account phase-out, and tax-exempt interest is added back only for the premium tax credit. This calculator does not know which of the two you are asking about, so it does what you told it.

2. All five add-backs: 40,000

   1. Add-backs: 120,000 ＋ 2,500 ＋ 8,000 ＋ 18,000 ＝ 148,500
   2. Modified figure: 40,000 ＋ 148,500 ＝ 188,500
   3. Add-backs as a share of AGI: 148,500 ÷ 40,000 × 100 ＝ 371.25%

   A share above 100 percent is a normal result, not a sign that something broke. Someone working abroad under the foreign earned income exclusion can have an AGI far smaller than the income the exclusion removed, and that is exactly the situation the add-back exists for: an income figure that looks modest next to a foreign salary. No single provision adds back all five of these at once, so treat this as a demonstration of the arithmetic rather than as a taxpayer you could go and find.

3. Nothing to add back: 52,000

   1. Add-backs: 0
   2. Modified figure: 52,000 ＋ 0 ＝ 52,000
   3. Add-backs as a share of AGI: 0 ÷ 52,000 × 100 ＝ 0%

   For most taxpayers the two figures are the same number, and that is a real answer rather than a page that did nothing. The add-backs are all either exclusions most people never claim or items only one provision looks at, so if none of them applies to you, every version of MAGI equals your AGI and the word stops mattering.

4. AGI below zero: −1,000 plus 500

   1. Add-backs: 500
   2. Modified figure: −1,000 ＋ 500 ＝ −500
   3. Add-backs as a share of AGI: 0 (the denominator is not positive, so the share is not meaningful)

   A negative adjusted gross income passes through here untouched, because this page adds rather than subtracts and a negative starting point is not an error. The last row reads 0 rather than going blank: with a non-positive denominator the ratio has no meaning, and leaving the row empty would suggest the page had stopped calculating.

This page does the addition and nothing else. It does not know which provision you are looking at, and that is the point rather than a gap — there is no single modified adjusted gross income to look up, so a page that picked one list for you would be wrong for two of the three thresholds and would give you no way to notice. It does not check whether an item you entered actually belongs to the provision you have in mind. It does not apply the phase-out, the contribution limit or the credit eligibility that made you look the figure up in the first place; it stops one step short, at the income measure those rules are written against. It does not compute your AGI — the field expects a number you already have, and the other page in this pair is where it comes from. It does not model the provisions that measure income by yet another definition, and there are several; the three in the table are the ones where the add-back list itself is the thing people get wrong. It does not handle the ordering rules that some provisions apply to each other: two of the three add back the deduction they are phasing out, and one of them also ignores a deduction the other one adds back, so a figure carried from one threshold to another is not always the figure the second threshold wants. The statutory citations in the table are citations and not amounts — the thresholds themselves are adjusted over time and depend on filing status, so the dollar figures for your year belong to an authoritative source for that year rather than to any table on this page.

Is modified adjusted gross income the same as adjusted gross income?

Sometimes, and for most people it is, because the items that get added back are either exclusions most taxpayers never claim or items only one provision looks at. When they differ, they differ because a specific rule wants to see income you were allowed to leave out. That is why the honest answer to what is my MAGI is another question: which provision are you asking about?

Why do different provisions use different definitions of the same term?

Because each one was written to measure a different thing. The premium tax credit is trying to decide who cannot afford insurance, so it looks at income that is genuinely available, including tax-exempt interest and Social Security that was never taxed. The retirement account limits are trying to stop people with high incomes from taking a deduction, so they add back the deduction being measured and ignore other deductions that would flatter the figure. The lists differ because the questions differ.

Does tax-exempt interest raise my taxes?

Not by being taxed. It stays out of gross income and out of adjusted gross income, which is what the exemption means. What it can do is move you across a threshold that is measured on a figure that includes it — the premium tax credit is the clearest case, and it is why a taxpayer can hold tax-exempt bonds and still find an income-tested credit reduced.

Why is the deduction being phased out added back into the income that phases it out?

Because otherwise the deduction would shrink the very number that decides how much of it you may take. If the full amount came off first, a larger deduction would lower the income measure and preserve more of itself, and the phase-out would partly undo its own purpose. So the measure is taken before that deduction, and the amount you actually took is added back to get there.

Can modified adjusted gross income be lower than adjusted gross income?

Not through this calculation, which only adds. Every one of the three provisions starts from AGI and increases it, so the figure is never smaller. If you saw a smaller number somewhere, it was a different measure — taxable income, for instance, which subtracts the standard or itemised deduction and is a step further down the return.

Which figure should I use for the retirement account contribution limit?

The one that adds back the deduction itself along with several exclusions, and that also ignores the student loan interest deduction. It is a shorter list than the one the premium tax credit uses: no tax-exempt interest, no untaxed Social Security, but two items the credit does not look at. The table on this page lists the three side by side for exactly this reason, because reaching for the wrong one is easy and nothing on the form will tell you.

• 26 U.S.C. §36B(d)(2)(B) — the premium tax credit's definition of modified adjusted gross income: the §911 exclusion, tax-exempt interest, and the portion of Social Security benefits not included in gross income — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School (United States)
• 26 U.S.C. §221(b)(2)(C) — the student loan interest deduction's own definition: which exclusions are disregarded, which sections are applied first, and the deduction itself left out of the measure — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School (United States)
• 26 U.S.C. §219(g)(3)(A) — the retirement account contribution phase-out's definition: a third list, which ignores the student loan interest deduction and does not touch the possession exclusions — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School (United States)
• Instructions for Form 8962, Premium Tax Credit — the filing-season wording of the same definition: modified AGI is AGI plus foreign earned income, tax-exempt interest, and the untaxed portion of Social Security — Internal Revenue Service (United States)