No, taxes on the middle class will not continue to increase every two years under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017

A viral video posted on Instagram in August claims taxes on the middle class will increase every two years until 2027 because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a tax reform bill signed into law by former President Donald Trump in December 2017.

VERIFY reader Jeff asked our team if this is true.

THE QUESTION

Will taxes on the middle class continue to increase every two years under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017?

THE SOURCES

• Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017
• Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
• The Joint Committee on Taxation
• Tax Foundation
• William G. Gale, Ph.D., co-founder and co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute
• Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center
• Mark Steber, chief tax information officer at Jackson Hewitt
• Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP)
• Garrett Watson, senior policy analyst and modeling manager at the Tax Foundation

THE ANSWER

No, taxes on the middle class will not continue to increase every two years under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

WHAT WE FOUND

Taxes on the middle class will not continue to increase every two years until 2027 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, according to our sources. That’s because there are no scheduled tax rate increases involved in the tax reform law.

However, the individual tax provisions in the law are set to expire in December 2025, and an act of Congress would be required to prevent a significant, one-time tax hike for most households when that happens.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act overhauled the federal tax code by reforming individual and business taxes, according to the Tax Foundation. Some of the major features of the law included lowering most individual income tax rates, and increasing the standard deduction for single and married filers. It also eliminated a variety of miscellaneous deductions and limited certain itemized deductions, such as the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, mortgage interest deduction (MID) and charitable contribution deduction.

The woman in the viral video points out a paragraph from a 2020 New York Times opinion piece that claims there are “built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021” buried in the pages of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that “by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy.”

But Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, and spokespersons for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Joint Committee on Taxation all told VERIFY that’s not true.

“No taxes have automatically increased in any of the two-year periods since passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” Gleckman said.

Under the current law, all of the individual tax provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire on Dec. 31, 2025, which “would result in a one-time significant tax increase for most households,” Gleckman explained. He added that “once these provisions expire, there would be no future tax increases under current law.”

“Most of the key changes included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are essentially temporary—that is, they are in effect from 2018 to 2025. As with any temporary provisions in tax law (and there are a number of them), Congress has to take specific action for those temporary provisions to remain in effect,” the IRS spokesperson said.

The Joint Committee on Taxation has published a list of the temporary provisions that are scheduled to expire in 2025 on its website. Some of the most impactful provisions set to expire include the reduction of individual income rates, increased child tax credit, the increased alternative minimum tax (AMT) exemption and phaseout threshold, and the increased standard deduction, according to the Tax Foundation.

“After 2025, without specific action by Congress, tax rates, the standard deduction and other tax provisions will be determined based on the law in effect before 2018,” the IRS spokesperson explained.

Gleckman noted that many Republican lawmakers have promised to extend individual tax provisions before they expire in 2025. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has said he would extend most provisions for households making $400,000 or less, which is about 95% of households, in his proposed 2024 budget.