There’s an undeniable fascination with looking at the highest income levels and their tax payments. Adrian Dungan provides a glimpse in “Individual Income Tax Shares, 2014,” which was published in the IRS house journal Statistics of Income Bulletin (Spring 2017, pp. 12-23).

Here’s a figure showing the share of returns and the share of income taxes paid. For example, the top 1% of income tax returns in 2014 accounted for 20.6% of all income, but 39.5% of all income tax. The top 50% of all tax returns accounted for 88.7% of all income and 97.3% of all income tax. Which in turn implies that the bottom half of all tax returns accounted for 11.3% of all income and 2.7% of all income tax.
 

Here’s a figure focused on the very upper end of this distribution. About 137 million tax returns were filed in 2014. Thus, the top 1% of those returns refers to the top 1.37 million tax returns; 0.1%, the top 137,000 returns; 0.01%, the top 13,700 returns; and 0.001%, the top 1,370 returns. The bars for the top 1% show the same numbers as in the figure above. But the top 0.001% accounts for 2.1% of all income and 3.6% of all income taxes.
 

What are the income levels for these different groups? The top 10% kicks in at about $130,000; the top 1% is at $460,000.

At the extreme upper end, the top 0.001% of tax returns reported income of nearly $60 million in 2014.

Finally, here’s some information on the average income tax rates paid by those in the highest brackets. A few points are worth noting here: 1) This is an average tax rate, not a marginal tax bracket–so these people are paying much higher tax rates on the marginal dollar; 2) Average taxes on those with very high incomes rose in 2012; and 3) The very highest income levels of 0.01% and 0.001% have slightly lower average tax rates, probably because these very high levels of income are likely to take the form of long-term capital gains that are taxed at a lower rate than regular income.