The tax revolution is over! The year 2024, unlike the previous ones, marked by downward revisions of tax levies, including in particular the abolition of the housing tax and the reform of the solidarity tax on wealth… has not provided for any reduction in income tax. Several modifications, however, deserve attention.
The taxpayer could in fact pay much less than the amount paid in 2023, relating to the declaration of the previous year. How will you tell me? Well the government, even if it has not adopted a direct reduction in the amount of tax to be paid, has implemented a reform which still concerns an evolution of the tax scale which should lead to a reduction in this amount, points out an article on the site Econostrum.info.
Indeed, the 2024 finance law plans to index the income tax scale to inflation, calculated at 4.8% excluding the price of tobacco. This indexation therefore implies the increase in tax thresholds, after their revision to the level of inflation recorded during this year 2023.
Result: the amount of tax to be paid should fall, particularly for the French whose salaries have increased little. A situation where almost everyone will come out a winner. This is confirmed by a study by the Institute of Public Policies (IPP), French people liable for IR will be slightly better off in 2024: “on average”, because wages have increased a little slower than inflation . According to Bercy, according to an article in Les Echos, this indexation represents a shortfall of 6.1 billion euros for public finances.
Here’s how taxes should go down for you this year.
To have a real gain, everything depends on the evolution of your income. Concretely: it is planned that the threshold for each of the five tax brackets 0% – 11% – 30% – 41% – 45% will be raised.
Thus, the bracket from 0% to 11% will no longer be taxed at 10,777 euros, but from 11,294 euros per year, i.e. a reassessment of the tax threshold of plus 4.8%. A readjustment which corresponds in short to compensation for inflation for the year 2023.
For example, if we take the case of a single person who earns 2,600 euros per month, with an increase below inflation, this year he paid 2,953 euros in taxes. But thanks to the new scale, he does not will pay next year only 2,645 euros, a saving of 308 euros, explains TF1 which reveals in passing that in France, 18 million pay income tax.
Which represents a real gain, especially accompanied by other measures to compensate for inflation, put in place by the government. With a few exceptions developed below.
Another government measure to compensate for inflation: “all retirement pensions will be increased by 5.2% from January 1, 2024,” reports Le Parisien. Social minimums will also be increased from April 1, 2024 by 4.6%, according to the same source. For RSA beneficiaries, for example, “this will represent an additional 28 euros per month”.
Bad news, however, for the wealthiest in the highest bracket, qualifies the article in Les Echos. The latter suffer the boomerang effect of their enrichment! Indeed, for ten years, the scale of the exceptional contribution on high incomes (CEHR) has not changed. This 3% tax will be added to the IR for income above 250,000 euros (for a single person), 4% above 500,000 euros.
And, with the high inflation of the last two years, more and more taxpayers have become richer and are crossing these thresholds. There were 50,000 in 2022, for a return of 1.5 billion euros, compared to 40,000 a year earlier, the article rightly notes.
