[petercooper]

One big difference, though, is in the US I believe you can file jointly if you are married and get roughly double the usual range for each tax bracket? That option isn't available in the UK and must surely make a huge difference with high income households.

[to11mtm]

Well, yes and no.

Single Income Married families have some benefits, or if one party makes a lot less than the other. However there are other disadvantages in some cases; after my first wife got married to me, her financial aid went into the toilet. Even though I was making less than 50k a year myself (and paying enough in student loans/etc that we were barely making ends meet,) that income counted against her. [0]

[0] - Filing separately (as we did once we were separated before our divorce) had it's own disadvanatges; namely that I could no longer declare my student loan interest on my taxes.

[dgildeh]

Thanks both - I actually did put a paragraph about this in the blog then took it out as the blog was too long, there are definitely differences between married vs. single in US/UK, but I wanted to look more at the worst case scenario.

Most of my friends/colleagues are not aware that for at least single tax filers, the difference between UK/California is less than 5%, I think its assumed Europe is significantly higher, and that's not the case anymore as the US bureaucracy has grown!