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Nearly one year after President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the landmark tax and spending law’s winners and losers are coming into focus.
The sweeping legislation lowered taxes for millions of households and businesses, while helping to pay for those tax cuts by cutting federal spending on programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.
“President Trump’s Working Families Tax Cut is simultaneously delivering short-term economic relief while laying the groundwork for long-term economic growth,” White House spokesman Kush Patel said in an email to CBS News about the law, which was signed by Mr. Trump on July 4, 2025.
“The benefits go beyond just a one-time tax refund check, with other provisions like full equipment expensing and a permanent 20% tax deduction for small businesses fueling long-term investment that will create jobs and raise wages,” he added.
Republican lawmakers laud the legislation as providing tax relief for low- and middle-income families and reducing waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs. Democrats counter that the law is financing those tax cuts, many of which they say benefit high-income families and corporations, by cutting programs that aid the most vulnerable Americans.
“Both can be true,” Andrew Lautz, the director of tax policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told CBS News. Many of the tax cuts “are pretty squarely targeted at middle-class taxpayers. At the same time, there are many provisions in this bill that primarily benefit the wealthy.”
In practice, the impact of the OBBBA varies by income, age, employment status, and whether a household relies on federal aid programs.
Because several major provisions, including new Medicaid work requirements and changes affecting student loan borrowers, don’t take effect until the second half of 2026 or in 2027, this analysis focuses on the parts of the law that are already affecting households, businesses and federal programs.
Winners: High-income households
One of the OBBBA’s biggest tax benefits was the extension of provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the signature tax legislation of President Trump’s first term. Without the OBBBA, those 2017 tax cuts would have expired at the end of 2025, pushing up taxes for many households starting this year.
Higher-income households benefited because the law permanently preserved the top individual tax rate at 37%, rather than allowing it to revert to 39.6%. That mostly affects the top 2% of U.S. taxpayers, or individuals earning over $640,000 and married couples with at least $768,000 in annual income, according to the nonpartisan Center for American Progress.
The OBBBA also benefited high-income households by increasing the state and local tax deduction, which the law raised from $10,000 to $40,000 a year.
“The top 1%, in fact, are in line to get $1 trillion in tax cuts from the law over a decade,” Jon Whiten, deputy director of the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP, told CBS News.
Winners: Corporations
Corporations are another big beneficiary of the bill, with the OBBBA restoring and making permanent 100% bonus depreciation for short-lived asset investments. That helps companies lower their tax bills by enabling them to immediately deduct the full cost of many investments, rather than writing them off over several years.
The law also made domestic research and development expenses immediately deductible, another boon to businesses that allows them to reduce their taxable income.
The OBBBA “included a potpourri of special subsidies and tax breaks that have slashed the tax bills of many hugely profitable corporations,” Whiten of ITEP said. “For example, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla together took home an astonishing $51 billion in tax breaks in 2025, much of it from the new law.”
Winners: Tipped and overtime workers
The so-called “no tax on tips” provision was aimed at helping tipped workers like waiters and hairdressers keep more of their income, while the “no tax on overtime” has a similar goal.
About 7 million workers claimed the “no tax on tips” deduction, while 28 million people claimed the overtime deduction, the House Ways and Means Committee said in May. The typical deduction in the most recent tax year was $7,000 for tips and $3,100 for overtime, according to the congressional panel.
“Tens of millions of working-class Americans have more money in their pockets thanks to President Trump’s signature provisions,” Patel of the White House said.
Winners: Senior citizens
Taxpayers over age 65 received a $6,000 bonus deduction under the OBBBA, subject to income limits. For instance, the deduction begins to phase out for single filers with incomes over $75,000 and is fully phased out for those earning above $175,000.
About 34 million seniors claimed the extra deduction this year, according to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Winners: Families saving money for their kids
The OBBBA created Trump Accounts, a new tax-advantaged investment account for children that includes a $1,000 Treasury deposit for eligible newborns.
Beginning July 4, parents, employers and others may contribute to the accounts, which are available to children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028.
Michael and Susan Dell of Dell Technologies have also pledged to give $250 to each of up to 25 million children who are under 10 and live in areas with median incomes below $150,000.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CBS News’ Kelly O’Grady in an exclusive interview Thursday that so far more than 6 million Americans have opened Trump Accounts. He also hopes they help teach savers to take a long-term investing approach and to take advantage of the compounding effect, which means you are earning interest on the interest over time, growing your wealth exponentially.
“We want them to really understand the power of long-term compounding,” Bessent said of the families who participate in the program. “So what we want them to understand is, what does a piece of the action feel like?”
Losers: SNAP recipients
The OBBBA made “unprecedented” changes to SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, according to Poonam Gupta, a tax expert with the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research group.
The law imposed new work requirements on able-bodied adults aged 18 to 64. Previously, the rule only applied to adults under 55. Other groups that were previously exempt must also now meet the work requirement, including former foster youth, veterans and people experiencing homelessness.
Individuals who don’t satisfy the work requirement are only entitled to three months of SNAP aid. Still, some experts say the work requirements will ultimately prove helpful to beneficiaries and the economy.
“Decades of research show attaching work incentives to government benefits helps families more than the transfer alone,” said Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the nonpartisan Cato Institute. “The positive effects of work requirements even carry into the next generation through improved outcomes for the kids.”
SNAP recipients aren’t the only parties affected by OBBBA’s changes. Retailers also could be losing out, according to the Urban Institute’s Heather Hahn, who researches the effects of federal policies such as SNAP on the well-being of children and families.
“With fewer SNAP benefits going out, retailers, especially smaller ones, which depend a lot on sales from SNAP benefits, will see less revenue,” she said.
States, which administer the federally funded program to their residents, started rolling out the work requirements last fall. Since the OBBBA was signed into law, SNAP participation has dropped by more than 4 million people, or 10%, through March, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Separately, Medicaid enrollees will face new work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks beginning in 2027 under the OBBBA. Those changes are expected to reduce Medicaid enrollment by between 5 million and 10 million people, according to the Urban Institute.
Losers: EV and clean energy businesses
The OBBBA ended federal tax incentives for electric vehicles last year and also sunset some clean energy credits, such as rooftop solar and home efficiency credits.
The law also accelerated the phaseouts for some corporate tax credits for clean energy investments, such as in solar and wind energy, according to consulting firm RSM.
EV sales have fallen sharply since the OBBBA ended the tax credits for the vehicles, with sales down 22% so far in 2026 compared with a year earlier, according to Cox Automotive.
