Social Security wage base 2026: the OASDI limit and maximum withholding

The 2026 numbers at a glance

The employee maximum went up $520.80 from 2025, entirely because the base moved — the 6.2% rate itself has not changed since 1990. Wages above $184,500 pay no Social Security tax for the rest of the calendar year, and the counter resets to zero on 1 January. Note that the ceiling applies per employer, not per person.

FICA rates for 2026: employee vs employer vs self-employed

FICA rates are statutory — they change only when Congress changes them, not with the annual inflation adjustments. Only the wage base moves each year.

Source: IRS Topic no. 751; SSA Social Security & Medicare tax rates.

Self-employed workers pay both halves on Schedule SE, but only 92.35% of net profit is SE-taxable, and half of the resulting tax is deductible above the line — which is why the $22,878.00 OASDI ceiling is reached at roughly $199,784 of net profit rather than exactly $184,500. Run the numbers on the self-employment tax calculator.

Medicare has no wage base — and the surtax threshold never moves

This is the single most common misreading of the wage base. Crossing $184,500 stops your Social Security withholding; it does nothing to Medicare. Medicare tax at 1.45% applies to every dollar of covered wages, with no ceiling of any kind — there has been no cap on Medicare-taxable earnings since 1994. (Medicare did briefly have its own separate maximums: $125,000 in 1991, $130,200 in 1992, $135,000 in 1993, after sharing the Social Security base through 1990.)

On top of the base rate, an Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% applies to earned income above a threshold set by filing status. There is no employer match on this one.

Source: IRS, Questions and answers for the Additional Medicare Tax; IRC §3101(b)(2).

These thresholds are NOT indexed for inflation. They are fixed dollar amounts written into the statute by the Affordable Care Act and have been unchanged since the tax took effect in 2013, while the Social Security wage base has risen every year the wage index moved. Two practical consequences: your employer must start withholding the 0.9% once IT pays you more than $200,000, regardless of your filing status, and the household-level reconciliation happens later on Form 8959 — so a married-filing-jointly couple can be over-withheld, and a two-earner couple under-withheld, in the same year. See the NIIT calculator for the separate 3.8% investment-income surtax that uses similar thresholds.

Social Security wage base by year, 1990 to 2026

Every contribution and benefit base SSA has set since 1990, with the OASDI rate that applied that year and the resulting ceilings. Employee maximum is what any one employer should have withheld from a worker earning at or above the base; self-employed maximum is the OASDI portion of self-employment tax at the full combined rate. The employer rate was 6.2% in every year shown.

* 2011 and 2012 were payroll-tax-holiday years: the OASDI rate was cut by 2 percentage points for employees and the self-employed, with the trust funds reimbursed from the general fund. The employer rate and the wage base were unaffected. Source: SSA contribution and benefit base table; SSA Social Security & Medicare tax rates (footnote c).

A few patterns worth knowing when you read the table: the base is re-computed from the national average wage index, so it is flat in years the index fell or stalled — $106,800 held for 2009, 2010 and 2011, and $118,500 held for 2015 and 2016. It has never gone down. For the longer-run analysis of how that growth compares with median earnings, see our wage base creep research report.

What the wage base does and does not affect

• Caps your Social Security tax: once year-to-date wages with one employer reach $184,500, that employer stops withholding OASDI for the rest of 2026. Take-home pay rises noticeably for high earners late in the year.
• Caps the earnings counted toward your benefit: the same ceiling limits the wages that enter your benefit computation, which is why it is called the contribution AND benefit base. Earning above it does not buy a larger check.
• Does nothing to Medicare: 1.45% continues on every dollar, plus 0.9% above $200,000 / $250,000 / $125,000.
• Does nothing to income tax: federal income tax brackets are entirely separate and keep applying above $184,500. Use the federal income tax calculator for that side.
• Not the same as the retirement earnings test: the earnings limit that reduces benefits for people claiming before full retirement age is a different, much lower figure — see the earnings test calculator.

Sources

• SSA — Social Security Contribution and Benefit Base
• SSA — Social Security & Medicare Tax Rates (OASDI and HI by year)
• IRS Topic 751 — Social Security and Medicare Withholding Rates
• IRS Topic 608 — Excess Social Security and Tier I RRTA Tax Withheld
• IRS — Additional Medicare Tax
• Form 8959 — Additional Medicare Tax reconciliation
• SSA — 2026 COLA Announcement (2.8%)