Paycheck calculator

The three taxes on a paycheck

They behave completely differently and blending them into one number hides that. Federal income tax is progressive: the first $16,100 is untaxed for a single filer and the rate climbs through seven brackets. FICA is the opposite — flat, from the very first dollar, with no deduction at all, which is why a low earner often pays more in FICA than in income tax. And state tax is whatever your state decided: nothing in nine of them, one flat rate in fifteen, brackets in the rest.

The calculator shows them as separate lines for that reason. If you only ever see a single “taxes” figure, you cannot tell which of the three a pay rise or a 401(k) contribution will actually move.

The paycheck where your pay goes up

Social Security is charged on the first $184,500 of wages in 2026 and not a dollar more. Above that salary it simply stops partway through the year, and every paycheck after that is larger by 6.2% of your gross.

Nearly every paycheck calculator averages this over the year and shows a figure you receive on none of your paydays. This one names the paycheck where it happens and what the new amount is, because if you are budgeting month to month that is the number you need.

Why your paycheck is not your salary divided by twelve

On $85,000 a year, federal income tax takes $9,870 and FICA $6,503, leaving $68,628 before any state tax. Divided across twelve months that is $5,719, against a gross twelfth of $7,083 — a gap of $1,364 every month that has nothing to do with your employer.

The pay period changes the arithmetic more than people expect. Paid every two weeks you get twenty-six cheques, not twenty-four, so two months a year carry three of them: $2,640 each on this salary, with $7,919 landing in the three-cheque months. Budgeting from a "monthly" figure that is really a bi-weekly one is the commonest reason a budget that balances on paper does not in practice.

Semi-monthly is different again — twenty-four cheques of $2,859, always two a month, always the same. Weekly gives fifty-two of $1,320. The annual tax is identical in all three; only the slicing changes, and withholding tables are built per period so that it comes out even by December.

Then there is everything that is not tax. Health insurance premiums, retirement contributions, HSA or FSA elections, disability and life cover, union dues, parking, transit. Several of those come out before tax is calculated and so reduce the tax as well, which is why the order of the lines on a payslip is not cosmetic.

Reading a payslip line by line

Gross pay is the top line and the only one most people can quote. Everything under it falls into three groups, and knowing which group a line belongs to tells you whether it reduces your tax, reduces your pay, or both.

Pre-tax deductions come first and reduce the base that tax is computed on: traditional 401(k), HSA, FSA, most employer health premiums. Taxes come second — federal income tax withheld, Social Security at 6.20%, Medicare at 1.45%, state income tax, and local where it applies. Post-tax deductions come last and reduce only your pay: Roth contributions, disability cover, garnishments, union dues.

The Social Security line stops mid-year for high earners. Above $184,500 of wages in 2026 the 6.20% ends until January, so a paycheck late in the year is larger than one in March with no change to salary or W-4. Medicare has no ceiling and adds 0.90% above $200,000.

Year-to-date columns are the ones worth checking, because they are what the W-2 will be built from. Comparing YTD federal withheld against an annual liability of $9,870 on a $85,000 salary, part-way through the year and prorated, is the earliest possible warning that April will surprise you — and the only point at which there is still time to fix it with a W-4.

Employer contributions appear on many payslips and are not deductions: the employer's half of FICA, the retirement match, the employer share of a health premium. They are part of what you cost and not part of what you are paid, and reading them as deductions is a common source of alarm.

Withholding is a prepayment, not the tax itself

Two different numbers get called "my tax". Your liability is what you actually owe for the year — brackets applied to taxable income, credits subtracted, one figure settled on your return. Withholding is what your employer sends the IRS on your behalf each payday, estimated in advance from a table. They are rarely equal, and the difference is your refund or your bill.

Employers do not know your liability. They know what you told them on your W-4 and what they are paying you, and the table assumes that this pay period repeats for the whole year. Anything that breaks that assumption — a mid-year start, a bonus, a second job, a spouse's income, self-employed income on the side — pushes withholding away from liability in one direction or the other.

A second job is the classic case. Each employer withholds as though its salary were your only income, so each applies the standard deduction and the lowest brackets to its own payments. Combined, you have used the deduction twice and the low brackets twice, and the shortfall arrives as a bill in April. The W-4's multiple-jobs section exists precisely for this and is the step most people skip.

Bonuses go the other way. Supplemental wages are commonly withheld at a flat 22% federal rate rather than at your marginal rate — over-withholding for someone in the 12.00% bracket and under-withholding for anyone above 22.00%. Neither changes what you owe; both change what you get in the moment, and the difference settles on the return.

Which is why this calculator computes liability rather than imitating a withholding table. On $85,000 it puts federal income tax at $9,870: what the year costs, not what a particular fortnight's table would deduct.

Overtime and bonuses are not taxed at a higher rate

Overtime is ordinary wages. It is paid at a premium rate, which is a contract matter, and taxed at exactly the same rates as the rest of your salary. What changes is withholding: a period with overtime in it looks, to the withholding table, like a period that will repeat all year — so the table withholds as though you now earn far more, and that period's deduction is disproportionately large. The annual figure corrects it.

Bonuses are handled differently again. Supplemental wages are commonly withheld at a flat 22% federal rate: on a $10,000 bonus that is $2,200 withheld, against $2,200 of actual tax at a 22.00% marginal rate on an $85,000 salary. You are under-withheld by $0, which is owed on the return.

Neither changes your liability by a cent. The annual calculation is the same regardless of how the money arrived or when — which is why "my bonus was taxed at 40%" describes a withholding artefact and not a tax rate, and why the correct response is to check the annual number rather than to argue with payroll.

The exception worth knowing is the additional Medicare tax. Above $200,000 of wages it adds 0.90%, and employers are required to start withholding it once your wages with them pass $200,000 — regardless of your filing status, which is why a married couple can be over-withheld on it and a two-job single filer under-withheld.

The W-4 is the only lever a salaried worker actually has

The form was rewritten in 2020 and no longer uses allowances. It asks instead for filing status, other jobs, dependants, other income and deductions — and it converts those into dollars rather than into a count of exemptions. Anyone still working from pre-2020 advice about "claiming zero" is describing a form that no longer exists.

Step 4(c) is the blunt instrument and the most useful one: an extra dollar amount withheld each pay period. If last year produced a bill of $1,200 and nothing about your situation has changed, dividing by your number of pay periods and entering that figure fixes it exactly — $46 a period on a bi-weekly schedule. It is more reliable than adjusting dependants, because it moves the number directly instead of moving an input to a table.

Step 2 handles two incomes in a household and is where most under-withholding originates. Step 3 claims dependants as dollars of credit rather than as allowances, and Step 4(a) and 4(b) let you account for other income and deductions so the table stops assuming your salary is everything.

You can file a new W-4 whenever you like, and the right times are predictable: marriage or divorce, a birth, a second job starting or ending, a spouse's job changing, a large bonus, buying a house if it moves you into itemising, or any year that ended with a surprise in either direction. Withholding corrects from the date it is filed forward, so a change made in January has twelve months to work and one made in November has two.

Deliberate over-withholding is a real choice, not an error. Some people want a refund as forced saving and accept lending the money at zero interest. Others want the cash monthly. The point of computing liability separately is that you can see the size of the gap and decide, instead of finding out in April.

What comes out before tax, and what it is worth

Some deductions reduce the income your tax is computed on and some do not, and the difference is worth real money. Traditional 401(k) and 403(b) contributions, HSA contributions, FSA elections and most employer health premiums come out pre-tax. Roth contributions, disability premiums and garnishments come out after.

Putting $10,000 a year into a traditional 401(k) on a $85,000 salary cuts federal income tax from $9,870 to $7,670 — a saving of $2,200, or 22.00% of what you contributed. The take-home cost of the contribution is therefore about $7,800, not $10,000, before any state saving on top.

FICA is the exception that catches people. A 401(k) contribution is exempt from income tax but not from Social Security and Medicare, so the 7.65% still applies to it. An HSA contribution made through payroll is exempt from both, which makes it the most tax-efficient dollar available to most employees — and the only one that avoids all three taxes at once.

The saving scales with your bracket, which is what makes the choice between traditional and Roth an actual calculation rather than a preference. A contribution deducted at 24.00% today and withdrawn at 12.00% in retirement wins; the reverse loses. Anyone expecting materially higher income later has a genuine case for Roth despite the lack of an up-front deduction.

State treatment is not automatic either. Most states follow the federal treatment of retirement contributions, but not all do, and a few tax contributions on the way in while exempting withdrawals on the way out. The state pages here say which.

The state and local lines, which most calculators leave blank

After federal and FICA, the state line is what separates two identical salaries. On $85,000 it runs from nothing in the nine states without an income tax to $6,604 in Oregon — $254 a fortnight, which is a visible difference on a payslip and a large one over a career.

States withhold on their own schedules and with their own forms. Several use the federal W-4, several publish their own, and a few require a separate election for an additional amount. Getting the federal form right and leaving the state one at its default is a common way to end up correctly withheld federally and wrong at state level.

Then there is the local line, which appears on payslips in eleven states and in almost no calculator. We have loaded 3,672 local jurisdictions across 7 states: 2,627 Pennsylvania municipalities, 892 Ohio municipalities and school districts, 92 Indiana counties, 24 Maryland jurisdictions, 24 Michigan cities, and New York City.

Where you live and where you work can both matter, and they are not the same rule everywhere. Michigan taxes non-residents at exactly half the resident rate. Ohio municipalities tax where the work is performed, with a credit at home that is sometimes partial. Indiana fixes your county as of 1 January. A commute across a municipal line changes the number, and it is the part of a payslip people most often cannot account for.

Starting a job part-way through the year

Withholding tables assume the current pay period repeats for a full year. Start in July and the table withholds as though your annual salary were what you will actually earn in six months — which over-withholds, sometimes substantially, and produces a refund that is really a year's worth of interest-free lending compressed into half a year.

The IRS estimator handles this case specifically, using year-to-date figures to work out what the remaining periods should withhold. It is the right tool for a mid-year start, and better at it than any annual calculator including this one.

What an annual calculator is for at this moment is the offer itself: what the salary is actually worth in that state and city, before you accept it. Those are different questions asked weeks apart, and using the wrong tool for either produces a confident wrong answer.

Two things to settle in the first week, because both are hard to fix later: the W-4, with Step 2 completed honestly if there is a second income in the household, and the retirement election, because an employer match not claimed from the start is money that does not arrive retroactively. On a $85,000 salary a 5.00% match is $4,250 a year, which is larger than most state tax bills at that income.

Questions

How do I work out my take-home pay?

Start from gross, subtract anything that comes out pre-tax — 401(k), HSA, health premiums — then federal income tax on what remains after the standard deduction of $16,100 single, then FICA at 6.2% plus 1.45%, then your state's own tax. Divide by the number of paychecks in the year. The calculator above does all of it.

Why are my last paychecks of the year bigger?

Because Social Security has an annual ceiling — $184,500 of wages for 2026. Once your year-to-date pay passes it, that 6.2% stops coming out and your take-home jumps for the rest of the year. Medicare has no ceiling and keeps going. Most paycheck calculators average this away; this one tells you which paycheck it happens on.

Why is my take-home lower than this figure?

Usually one of three things. Your employer withholds according to the W-4 on file, which may not match your actual liability — that gap is what becomes a refund or a bill at filing. Your employer may also deduct things this calculator knows nothing about: union dues, garnishments, life cover, parking. And eleven states let counties or cities levy their own income tax on top, which is not included here.

Does a 401(k) contribution save me FICA?

No, and this catches people out. Traditional 401(k) contributions reduce your taxable income for income tax, but Social Security and Medicare are charged on your gross pay before that. So a dollar into a 401(k) saves you your marginal income tax rate, not your marginal rate plus 7.65%. An HSA through payroll is the exception — it does avoid FICA.

Which states take nothing from my paycheck?

Nine: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming. Federal tax and FICA still come out everywhere — no state can change those. And these states raise the money another way, usually through property tax, so a bigger paycheck does not always mean a cheaper life.

Is semi-monthly the same as every two weeks?

No, and the difference is real money per paycheck. Twice a month is 24 paychecks a year; every two weeks is 26. On the same salary, the biweekly paycheck is smaller — you just get two extra of them. It is the same annual pay, but budgeting from the wrong one is a common mistake.