The experience of foreign universities in researching reforms of personal income taxation is especially interesting now for the Russian Federation as it plans to transfer from a proportional to a progressive personal income tax scale. Russia has the experience of using a progressive personal income tax, but it proved to be untenable because of minimal collection of taxes at the highest rate. The key objective of our research was finding the optimal tax rates and the number of personal income tax increments in the Russian Federation. The novelty of our research is in the use of indicators of several states to calculate the unknown quantity, while the custom here is adaptation of a foreign country's taxation system to local realities. The article presents comparative analysis of several foreign systems of progressive taxation of individuals, which take into account economic and social realities of each state. We compared indicators of the economies under research linked with the social features of taxation, national income distribution and the importance of the personal income tax for the budgets. Modern legislations establish different methods of calculating the taxation base for individuals, the rates. The research of foreign universities in the area of reforming personal income taxation, the extended experience of progressive personal income tax collection in these states and adaptation to Russia should help the Russian Federation introduce an effective progressive scale of the personal income tax. Basing on the data from 21 countries with a progressive personal income tax scale our research outlines several parameters of the personal income tax model, which could be used in the Russian economy taking into account the differences of local development indicators compared with their foreign analogues.