Up to 85 percent of a Social Security recipient’s benefits are subject to the individual income tax. CBO estimates that income taxes on Social Security benefits totaled $51 billion in 2014.

    

This supplemental data to The Taxation of Social Security Benefits shows the effect of taxing Social Security benefits by income class estimated for tax year 2014.

    

CBO’s forecasts generally have been comparable in quality to those of the Administration and the Blue Chip consensus, with large errors by CBO tending to reflect difficulties shared by other forecasters.