Paycheck Calculator

What actually happens to your pay

Gross pay is the number you negotiated. Net pay is the number you live on. Between the two sits a sequence of deductions that happens in a fixed order, and that order matters more than most people realise — because each step changes the base the next step is calculated on.

Your 401(k) contribution lowers your income tax but not your Social Security tax. Your health premium lowers both. That single difference is why two people contributing the same amount can see different take-home pay.

The order of operations

Your employer starts with gross pay for the period and works down:

• Pre-tax deductions come out first. Traditional 401(k), 403(b), HSA, and health, dental and vision premiums run through a Section 125 plan. These reduce the wages your taxes are calculated on.
• Federal income tax is withheld based on the W‑4 you filed, using IRS percentage-method tables.
• FICA — Social Security and Medicare — is withheld at fixed rates, with no brackets and no allowances.
• State and local income tax, where your state has one.
• Post-tax deductions last: Roth 401(k), union dues, garnishments, life insurance above the tax-free limit.

How to calculate your paycheck by hand

The calculator does this in one pass. The arithmetic is still worth knowing, because it is the only way to tell whether your employer has it right.

Take a single filer on $65,000, paid every two weeks, putting 5% into a traditional 401(k) with $120 a paycheck in health premiums.

1. Start with annual gross pay. $65,000.
2. Take off pre-tax deductions. The 401(k) removes $3,250 and premiums remove $3,120, leaving $58,630.
3. Take off the federal standard deduction of $16,100. Federal taxable income is $42,530.
4. Apply the federal brackets. 10% on the first $12,400, 12% on the $30,130 above it. That is $4,856.
5. Work out FICA on a different figure. Social Security and Medicare ignore the 401(k) but not the premiums, so both apply to $61,880 — $3,837 and $897.
6. Add state tax using your own state's deductions and rates.
7. Divide by 26 to get the amount per paycheck.

Step five is where hand calculations usually go wrong. People subtract their 401(k) before working out Social Security, which understates it by 6.2% of whatever they contributed. Your retirement contribution lowers your income tax. It does not lower your FICA.

Federal income tax withholding

The W‑4 was redesigned in 2020 and no longer uses allowances. Instead you declare your filing status, other jobs, dependants, other income and deductions, and your employer converts that into a withholding amount each pay period.

Withholding is an estimate, not the tax itself. Your actual liability is settled when you file. If too much came out you get a refund; if too little, you owe. A large refund is not a win — it is an interest-free loan you made to the government.

These are marginal rates. Being "in the 22% bracket" does not mean 22% of your income goes to tax — it means the last dollar you earned was taxed at 22%. The first $12,400 is still taxed at 10%. On a $65,000 salary the effective federal rate lands closer to 10% once the standard deduction is applied.

FICA: the part nobody can adjust

Social Security is withheld at 6.2% on the first $184,500 of wages in 2026. Once you cross that ceiling, it stops for the rest of the year — which is why high earners see their take-home jump in the autumn. Your employer pays a matching 6.2%.

Medicare is withheld at 1.45% with no ceiling at all, and an Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% applies to wages above $200,000. That extra 0.9% is employee-only; your employer does not match it. Note that the $200,000 trigger is not indexed to inflation and is the same regardless of filing status, so married couples routinely have too much or too little withheld and settle it at filing.

Hourly pay, overtime and converting to a salary

Paid by the hour, your gross pay moves every period, so the useful question is what a given number of hours is worth after tax. Switch the calculator to hourly and enter your rate and usual hours.

To convert between the two, use 2,080 hours — 40 hours across 52 weeks. $24 an hour is $49,920 a year. A $65,000 salary is $31.25 an hour.

That conversion ignores two things. Overtime is the first: if you are non-exempt under federal law, hours beyond 40 in a week are paid at one and a half times your rate, and overtime is taxed as ordinary wages, not at some separate penalty rate. A heavy overtime week can push a single paycheck into a higher withholding bracket even though your annual income never gets there, which is why one big cheque can look over-taxed and correct itself at filing.

Unpaid time off is the second. A salaried worker gets the same amount whether they take a week off or not. An hourly worker on 2,080 hours a year who takes two unpaid weeks actually works 2,000, and the real hourly-to-annual figure drops with it.

State income tax

This is where the biggest swing lives. In 2026, states fall into three groups:

• Nine states take nothing from wages — Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. Washington levies a tax on certain capital gains, but not on wage income.
• Fifteen states use a single flat rate, starting as low as Arizona's 2.50%. Flat does not mean simple: most still apply their own standard deduction or personal exemption before the rate hits, and several are cutting their rate every year — Georgia dropped from 5.19% to 4.99% in the middle of 2026.
• The rest use graduated brackets, which vary enormously in both rate and where the brackets begin.

Local income taxes sit on top of all of this and catch people out. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Michigan, Maryland, Indiana, Missouri, Alabama and New York all have cities, counties or school districts that levy their own. New York City residents pay a city income tax of their own; Philadelphia's wage tax applies whether you live there or merely work there.

Why your paycheck changed this month

If the number moved and you did nothing, it is almost always one of these:

• You hit the Social Security wage base. Pay goes up for the rest of the calendar year, then back down in January.
• January reset. New brackets, a new wage base, and a new deductible year for your health plan.
• A benefits change. Open enrolment, a new plan tier, or a dependant added.
• A three-paycheck month. On a biweekly schedule, twice a year you get 27 pay dates in a 12-month window — the extra cheque often has fewer fixed deductions taken from it.
• A bonus was paid. Supplemental wages are typically withheld at a flat 22% federal rate, which usually over-withholds relative to your actual rate.

Checking this against your own pay stub

Every US pay stub shows the same core lines, whatever the payroll software calls them:

• Gross pay for the period, and usually year to date beside it
• Federal income tax — the largest single deduction for most people
• Social Security, often labelled OASDI or FICA-SS
• Medicare, often FICA-Med or MED
• State income tax, where your state has one
• Pre-tax deductions such as 401(k), health, dental and HSA

Two checks take about ten seconds. Divide the Social Security line by your gross pay for the period: it should be 6.2% until you pass $184,500 for the year, then nothing. Do the same with Medicare and you should get 1.45%. Those two rates are fixed and have no allowances, so if either is off, the error is on the stub rather than in your W-4.

Federal income tax is the line that legitimately varies, because it follows what you put on your W-4. If the taxes deducted from your paycheck look wrong, that is almost always where to look first.

Lines that will not appear in the estimate above: local city or county income tax, state disability and paid-family-leave contributions, union dues, garnishments, and anything deducted after tax rather than before it.

Biweekly is not the same as twice a month

Every two weeks means 26 pay dates a year. Twice a month means 24. On the same salary, a biweekly cheque is smaller than a semi-monthly one — you simply get two more of them. If you budget monthly, the two "extra" cheques a year are the ones worth saving rather than absorbing.