The State TANF Income Calculator

How well off is a family on welfare? How does a family's net income change as an adult goes back to work? Use the State TANF Income Calculator (STIC) to compute net income for a one-parent family with two children, taking into account the following sources of income:

1. State TANF Grants
2. Cash value of food stamps
3. Payroll taxes
4. Federal income tax liabilities
5. Federal earned income tax credits

STIC is a powerful tool for policy analysts. Users can select any state, target specific levels of work effort, and even experiment with a state's TANF rules and sanction policies. STIC will then compute the family's net income. (Coming soon: changing the family size using this calculator.)

See a detailed Description of STIC and review the underlying assumptions that make STIC work. Read the Directions on how to use STIC and check out data Sources. The Glossary provides specific definitions of terms used in STIC

Use the State TANF Income Calculator (STIC)

Examples of the type of analyses you can do with STIC appear in the Urban Institute's Occasional Paper "Does Work Pay? An Analysis of the Work Incentives under TANF," by Gregory Acs, Norma Coe, Keith Watson, and Robert I. Lerman, July 1998.

The 1999 State TANF Income Calculator was developed by the Urban Institute.