Experimental research on tax fairness has tended to focus on limited interpretations of fairness,and to do so by manipulating one attribute at a time. This strategy tends to confound multiple questions and it impedes a comprehensive understanding of the relative importance of different conceptions of fairness. This paper addresses these limitations through a conjoint experiment that identifies the causal role ability to pay, deservingness and compensatory fairness considerations play in determining peoples' preferences for how the tax burden should be distributed, and how these preferences vary by respondent characteristics. In so doing, it presents the first evidence that compensatory arguments play an important role in determining tax preferences and have the capacity to garner support for progressive taxes as a way of compensating for the regressiveness of indirect taxation.