How has the tax burden distribution changed since 2010?

1. The broad arc: average burdens fell for many but concentration at the top stayed high

Analyses anchored in 2010 show the top quintile already shouldering most federal tax revenue—paying about 68.8 percent of federal taxes in that year—while the middle quintile paid about 9.1 percent and the bottom quintile a negligible share ^[1]; subsequent policy changes and the 2010s economic recovery lowered average federal tax rates for many households and left the largest absolute shares of revenue concentrated among high earners ^{[2] [4]}.

2. What happened to the top: big shares, mixed rate movement

Scholars and policy shops have documented that the top of the income distribution continued to dominate federal tax payments even as tax policy in the 2000s and 2010s reduced statutory and effective rates for high earners; commentators from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities note that the early-2000s tax cuts and later changes produced outsized reductions in the tax burdens of the very wealthy, and Tax Policy Center and IRS data confirm that average rates remained lower after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for most income groups, including high earners ^{[5] [2] [4]}.

3. Middle and lower-income households: lower average rates but differing experiences

Although many middle- and upper-middle households saw lower average federal tax rates compared with earlier decades, that decline did not make the distribution more equal: middle quintiles still paid only a modest slice of total federal tax receipts compared with the top quintile, and lower-income households often pay little or no federal income tax though they still face payroll, state, and local levies ^{[1] [4] [6]}.

4. State and local taxation: small net movement, large local variation

Across state and local governments the aggregate burden as a share of income has been relatively stable over decades, with only slight declines in long-term national averages (for example, a small drop in average state-local tax burdens since the late 1970s), although pandemic-era changes temporarily pushed burdens higher in 2020–2022 and created year-to-year volatility and cross-state divergence ^{[3] [7]}.

5. Measurement, policy changes and the tax gap complicate the view

Interpreting shifts in tax burden depends heavily on measurement choices—what counts as “tax,” whether refundable credits are treated as spending, and whether one measures legal incidence or economic incidence—and on enforcement: IRS estimates suggest the overall tax gap and compliance rates were essentially unchanged in the 2008–2010 window, meaning unpaid taxes shift burdens onto compliant payers and complicate comparisons over time ^{[8] [9] [2]}.

6. Why policy history matters: major laws altered effective burdens after 2010

The 2001–2008 tax reductions and extensions, plus later policy such as the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and subsequent budgetary choices, materially reduced statutory rates, widened brackets, and expanded standard deductions and credits in ways that, by most accounts, lowered average burdens for taxpayers across the distribution while often delivering larger dollar cuts or percentage declines to higher-income households ^{[5] [10] [2]}.

7. Bottom line: distribution shifted in nuance, not inverting the old pattern

Since 2010 the U.S. tax system has trended toward lower average federal tax burdens for many households and preserved—indeed continued—the dominance of the top quintile in total federal revenue shares, while state-local taxation moved only slightly and measurement and compliance issues temper any simple conclusion about “who pays more” ^{[1] [2] [3] [8]}. Where the record is thin in these sources, updated Treasury distributional tables and ongoing CBO and Tax Policy Center work fill in details but do not overturn the core pattern evident in the cited reporting ^{[11] [9]}.