Earn a dollar more, take home less. Benefit cliffs happen when a household loses more in benefits than it gains in earnings.
CliffWatch shows where, when, and how — across earnings levels and US states.
Live demo Fri May 29, 1pm ET → us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi…
At the @codeforamerica Summit in Chicago:
- Our CEO @MaxGhenis moderated a session on PolicyEngine's open-source ecosystem with rules engine users Amplifi, MyFriendBen, and Georgetown's Better Government Lab
- @DaphneRHansell presented our new Coverage Compass tool
PolicyEngine at the @codeforamerica Summit this week.
Thu 2pm — @DaphneRHansell on Coverage Compass: how life events change health coverage.
Fri 2pm — @MaxGhenis moderating a panel with three orgs using PolicyEngine to calculate eligibility and amounts for different purposes: MyFriendBen, Amplifi, and Better Government Lab at Georgetown.
Say hi in Chicago.
New @UHEROnews analysis uses PolicyEngine to simulate Hawaii's childcare credit bills — first the direct household effect of the expanded CDCC, then the integrated CDCC, EITC, SNAP, WIC, and state income tax impact when a second earner enters the workforce in response.
We added a ton of ingredients to @ThePolicyEngine cauldron last month:
- 1,039 PRs merged (7× April 2025, 2× March 2026)
- 341,318 source-code lines changed
- 19 new repos
Childcare subsidy rules, Forbes 400, better reproducibility - all make our models more accurate & useful.
The first analysis from our AI and economics research initiative answers the question: What happens if income shifts from labor to capital?
We find a 10% shift raises the top 1%'s market income share from 25.7% to 29.3%. After taxes and transfers: 21.4% to 24.4%. Policy absorbs about 19% of the increase.
policyengine.org/us/ai-inequ…
NEW INTERACTIVE: @repkmr has released the Working Parents Tax Relief Act (WPTRA), which increases the maximum EITC benefit by $5,500 for each child under 4 in a tax unit.
We project the bill would:
- Lower federal revenues by $184.1B over 10 years
- Benefit 2.9% of households and reduce child poverty by 1.4% in 2026
Use our calculator below to explore the effect on your household, more nationwide impacts, and how each congressional district would benefit from the WPTRA:
policyengine.org/us/working-…
If you think LLMs are mostly typing back and forth with chatbots, this post by @PolicyEngineUS is a really helpful worked example on what it looks like to layer agents to collapse 2-3 weeks of work into 90 minutes.
policyengine.org/us/encode-p…
The Living Wage Institute has adopted PolicyEngine for the tax calculations behind their living wage data. Read how our model is improving the accuracy of their household tax estimates — from iterative income solving to local tax coverage.
livingwage.institute/post/ho…
How much would California's billionaire wealth tax actually raise? It depends on your assumptions about avoidance, departures, and income tax loss.
We built an interactive calculator that lets you explore the tradeoffs — with presets calibrated to existing papers.
@MaxGhenis and @ThePolicyEngine team have integrated frontier agentic AI into the most expansive open source microsimulation model of US fiscal policy. AI allows easier use and access as well as automates much of the model creation and maintenance.
youtu.be/Ke_J3pOdL8k?si=in6Q…
We updated the State Legislative Tracker: You can now track tax bills across all 50 states, see each bill's legislative stage, follow real-time activity, and jump to full PolicyEngine analysis.
Try it at policyengine.org/us/state-le…
"Liberals and lawmakers should treat this as an exercise on what they want their priorities to be with a set amount of funding. If $1.5 trillion in new revenue is raised, Options B and C provide flexibility to pursue other reforms while being capable of reducing the deficit."