Every year, the various tax agencies calculate how many Americans do not pay a federal income tax. The 2015 tax year number estimates that 77.5 million households, which is 45.3%, according to the research Tax Policy Center. This number is only for federal taxes and does not include state income taxes.
There are two main reasons for the lack of federal taxes: either the household has no taxable income, or their tax liability is reduced and offset by tax breaks.
The research also calculated the various income levels from the richest and the poorest.
“The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay a higher effective income tax rate than any other group (around 23 percent, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50 percent.
On average, those in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87 percent of all the income tax collected by Uncle Sam.
The top 1 percent of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the US; the top 0.1 percent — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20 percent of it.”
Federal taxes are not the only taxes that Americans pay. Income, payroll, corporate income, state, local, property taxes, estate taxes, and excise taxes (which include taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes), are all various forms of taxation that are spread out and paid by households daily.