Romney’s Tax Returns Show $21.6 Million Income in ’10

Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, had an effective federal income tax rate in 2010 of 13.9 percent, paying about $ 3 million in taxes on an adjusted gross income of $ 21.6 million, the vast majority of it flowing from a myriad of stock holdings, mutual funds and other investments, including profits and investment income from Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney retired from in 1999.

That rate will rise to 15.4 percent for 2011, when the couple expects to report an adjusted gross income of about $ 20.9 million.

Both rates are much lower than the rates paid by either President Obama or Newt Gingrich, Mr. Romney’s Republican rival, who released his tax returns last week. Mr. Romney’s own tax proposals would cut his federal income taxes by about 40 percent — but Mr. Gingrich’s proposal, which would abolish capital gains taxes, would almost entirely eliminate them.

The documents were posted on Mr. Romney’s Web site on Tuesday morning after days of escalating political pressure on Mr. Romney from the other Republican candidates, Democrats and even his own supporters, some of whom blamed his loss in South Carolina’s Republican primary last weekend on Mr. Romney’s shifting and tentative responses to questions about his wealth, tax burden and overseas income.

With the potentially decisive Florida primary just days away, Mr. Romney pivoted quickly on Tuesday to release the documents, while also attacking Mr. Obama, scheduling a speech the Romney campaign billed as a “pre-buttal” to the president’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night.

The 547 pages of documents included 2010 federal income tax returns for the Romneys, the couple’s estimated 2011 return and returns for their charitable foundation and two blind trusts established in their names, as well as a trust established for their children.

The returns show that Mr. Romney, whose family fortune is estimated to be as much as a quarter of a billion dollars, is among the wealthiest Americans: The family’s income would put them in the top one-10th of 1 percent of all taxpayers in 2010.

Yet thanks to rules that tax income from investments at rates far lower than income earned in wages, Mr. Romney has a lower effective tax rate than many affluent Americans. Indeed, Mr. Romney will have given more to charity in 2010 and 2011 than to the federal treasury: more than $ 7 million in charitable donations, or about 16.5 percent of the family’s income, both directly and through the couple’s family foundation.

Mr. Romney, a Mormon, tithes his income to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2010, Mr. Romney’s tithe appeared to include about $ 1.6 million in cash and $ 1.5 million in noncash contributions.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Romney’s campaign counsel, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, said that Mr. Romney and his wife earned $ 7.4 million in so-called carried interest in 2010 and $ 5.5 million in 2011, reflecting the share of Bain profits that the firm pays to Mr. Romney under his retirement agreement with his former partners.

That money — about a quarter of the couple’s income during the last two years — is currently taxed at the rate normally reserved for long-term capital gains, thanks to federal tax rules that have sparked intense debate in recent years. Mr. Obama and other Democrats have argued that carried interest should be taxed at the rates that normally apply to income earned by people providing services, which top out at 35 percent.

If Mr. Romney’s carried interest income in the last two years had been taxed at that higher rate, he would have owed about $ 4.5 million in federal taxes, roughly $ 2.6 million more than he would typically be assessed under current rules.

The couple, who currently own homes in Belmont, Mass.; La Jolla, Calif.; and Wolfeboro, N.H., paid $ 672,000 in state income taxes and $ 226,000 in local property taxes.