About US Paycheck Calculator

What this site does

US Paycheck Calculator works out what your employer is likely to withhold from your pay, and what is left. It runs the percentage method the IRS sets out in Publication 15-T against the 2026 federal brackets, applies Social Security and Medicare on the correct wage base, and then applies the withholding rules published by each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

There are fourteen calculators on the site and they all share one tax engine. That matters for accuracy: when a rate changes in January, it changes in one place rather than fourteen, so the hourly calculator and the bonus calculator can never disagree with each other.

Why we built it

Most free paycheck calculators make the same two mistakes. The first is treating a traditional 401(k) contribution as though it reduces Social Security and Medicare wages. It does not. FICA is charged on gross pay less Section 125 items such as health premiums, HSA and FSA contributions, and a retirement deferral is not one of those. Getting this wrong overstates take-home pay for anyone contributing to a retirement plan.

The second is skipping the state-specific detail that decides real paychecks: California State Disability Insurance at 1.3% with no wage cap, New York paid family leave, the Massachusetts paid leave premium, the Washington long-term care premium, and the Pennsylvania rule that taxes retirement deferrals even though the federal calculation exempts them. Those lines are the difference between an estimate that matches your pay stub and one that does not.

How the tax data is maintained

Every rate, bracket, threshold and wage cap lives in a single data file, each entry carrying the URL it came from and the date it was last checked. Those dates are published on the page that uses them, so you can see for yourself how current a figure is. No tax number is written into the calculator code.

Federal figures are taken from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and reconciled against IRS Publication 15-T. Social Security and Medicare figures come from the Social Security Administration annual announcement. State figures for the highest-traffic states come from each state’s own revenue or employment department withholding guide; the remainder are taken from the Tax Foundation’s annual compilation of state statutes and instructions, and each state page names which applies.

Where a figure is not verified, the calculator says so in the results panel instead of filling the gap with a guess. Local city wage taxes are the clearest example: they are real money in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan and New York City, they vary by street address, and we exclude them rather than pretend to a precision we do not have. The methodology page lists every assumption and every exclusion.

What this site does not do

There is no account, no email capture and no paid tier. Nothing you type is transmitted or stored: the whole calculation runs in your browser, which is why the figures update as you type and why we cannot see any of them. We do not cover payroll tax outside the United States, because depth in one country is more useful than shallow coverage of twenty.

We also do not give tax advice. These are withholding estimates. What you finally owe is settled on your return, where credits, itemised deductions, other income and household circumstances all apply. For decisions that turn on your own situation, speak to a CPA or an enrolled agent.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with your pay stub or with your state’s withholding guide, we want to know. Send the state, the filing status, the gross amount and pay frequency, and the figure you expected, to the address on our contact page. Corrections are made against the state’s own published guide and the reason is recorded in the data file for that state.