IRS Releases Spring 'Statistics of Income' Bulletin

The Internal Revenue Service has released the spring 2014 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, which provides information on high-income individual income tax returns filed for tax year 2011. Income tax statistics are more reliable after three years, since taxpayers can amend returns up to three years old.

Taxpayers filed almost 5 million returns with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or more for 2011, up over 9 percent from the prior year. These high-income returns represent about 3 percent of all returns filed for the tax year.

The Statistics of Income (SOI) Division produces the SOI Bulletin on a quarterly basis. Articles included in the publication provide the most recent data available from various tax and information returns filed by U.S. taxpayers. This issue of the SOI Bulletin also includes articles on the following topics:

Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2011: Of the 145 million individual tax returns filed in tax year 2011, almost 92 million were classified as taxable returns or returns with a total income tax greater than $0. Adjusted gross income (AGI) for taxable returns was nearly $7.7 trillion, up 6 percent from the prior year. Total income tax was more than $1 trillion. To be included in the top 1 percent of returns for 2011 required an AGI of $388,905.
Individual Noncash Contributions, 2011: For tax year 2011, there were more than 22 million individual taxpayers who reported a total of $43.6 billion in deductions for noncash charitable contributions. About a third (7.5 million) of these taxpayers reported nearly $39 billion in deductions for charitable contributions of $500 or more.
Individual Foreign-Earned Income and Foreign Tax Credit, 2011: Nearly 450,000 U.S. taxpayers reported $54 billion of foreign-earned income for tax year 2011. This represented growth in real terms of over 32 percent since the last study in 2006.