Washington State 1099 Tax Calculator (2026)

Self-employment tax comes first and it is much the larger number. It applies to 92.35% of net earnings — $60,028 × 15.3% = $9,184, being $7,443 of Social Security and $1,741 of Medicare. Half of it, $4,592, comes back off your income before federal income tax is figured.

Federal income tax takes what is left after the $16,100 standard deduction and the 20% QBI deduction (worth $12,082 here), which leaves $32,226 taxable and a bill near $3,619. Together that is $12,803, an effective rate of 19.7% of gross, leaving $0.80 of every 1099 dollar.

Nothing is added at the state level, and the value of that is easiest to see against the state next door. Run the same $65,000 through the 50-state table with Oregon selected and it adds roughly $3,190of state income tax — the highest rate in that table, and a commute away. A freelancer who works from Vancouver rather than Portland keeps that, which is the whole Washington story in one figure.

What Washington does instead is tax business activity rather than income. Its business & occupation tax applies to your gross receipts, its capital gains excise tax applies to investment gains, and neither one is an income tax on your Schedule C profit. Both are covered below, because “no income tax” is a true statement about a narrower thing than most freelancers hear in it.

Figures assume no business expenses and no W-2 wages. Every deductible expense you track cuts both the income tax andthe SE tax, which is where the leverage is when there is no state layer to attack — run yours through the deduction estimator.

Not on your 1099 income. Washington charges 7% on long-term capital gains allocated to the state — selling stock, bonds, or an interest in a business — and freelance earnings are not capital gains. Schedule C profit is ordinary income, so no amount of 1099 work triggers this tax. That distinction matters here because the tax is often described as an income tax on Washington’s wealthiest, which invites exactly the wrong inference for a self-employed reader.

The thresholds put it further out of reach. It applies only to gains above a standard deduction of $278,000 for tax year 2025, the most recent figure the Department of Revenue has published, and the deduction is inflation-adjusted every year. Since tax year 2025 the rate is tiered: 7% on the first $1,000,000 of taxable Washington gains and 9.9% — the 7% plus an additional 2.9points — above it. Real estate is exempt, as are assets held in retirement accounts and depreciable business property. The tax applies to individuals only, though an individual owner can owe it on gains realized inside a pass-through or disregarded entity.

Where it can reach a freelancer is at the exit rather than in the work: selling the business. If you build something with goodwill or equity worth more than the standard deduction and sell it as a long-term asset, that gain is in scope even though every dollar you earned running it was not. The same applies to a large stock sale funding a career change — the deduction is generous, but it is a threshold, not an exemption for the self-employed.

The tax is also settled law and settled politics, which is worth knowing before planning around its removal. The Washington Supreme Court upheld it as an excise tax rather than a tax on property, and Initiative 2109 — a straight repeal on the November 2024 ballot — was rejected by voters, 63.2% against. The return is due on the same date as your federal return and must be filed electronically, and you only file at all if you have gains above the deduction.

Washington runs two state programs that a W-2 worker is enrolled in automatically through payroll and a 1099 worker gets only by electing coverage. Neither is a tax you owe by default, which is exactly why they are easy to miss until you need them.

Paid Family & Medical Leave. Self-employed people can opt in at any time. You pay the employee share of the premium only, not the employer share: the total premium for 2026 is 1.13% and the employee portion of it is 71.43%, so your rate works out at about 0.81% — roughly $525on this page’s income, on earnings up to the same $184,500 Social Security cap the SE tax uses. You report earnings quarterly, and the initial election commits you for 3 years.

WA Cares. The long-term care program charges 0.58% of a self-employed worker’s net earnings — about $377here, with no wage cap — for a lifetime benefit starting at $36,500 and indexed from there. The timing is the part to note: the general opt-in window for self-employed workers closed on June 30, 2026. Past that date, you can still elect coverage only within 3years of first becoming self-employed — so this is a live decision for anyone who went freelance recently and a closed one for anyone who did not.

Both premiums are the self-employed analogue of a benefit a paycheck delivers silently, and both are separate from the taxes above — the same trade that makes buying your own health insurance deductible and unemployment insurance unavailable. See contractor versus employee for the rest of what does not come with a 1099.