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TakeHomeMath

How take-home pay is calculated

It works out the income tax and payroll contributions owed on a full year at one salary, then divides that by your pay periods. Every figure comes from the document that publishes it, and carries the day a human last read it.

What number is this?

An annual liability, not a payslip. Your employer withholds under a separate instrument — the W-4 elections you filed and your state's withholding tables — and those are built to approximate the year's tax, not to equal it. The two are reconciled when you file, which is why a per-paycheck figure here and the one on your payslip can differ in both directions and still both be right.

The order of operations

  1. Pre-tax deductions come off gross salary first. A traditional 401(k) lowers taxable income but not Social Security or Medicare wages; HSA and Section 125 premiums lower both.

  2. The standard deduction for your filing status comes off next, leaving federal taxable income.

  3. Federal taxable income fills the brackets in turn. Only the income inside a bracket pays that bracket rate.

  4. Social Security takes 6.2% up to the annual wage base. Medicare takes 1.45% of everything, plus 0.9% above the additional Medicare threshold.

  5. State income tax uses that state’s own deduction and brackets, and adds back any pre-tax deduction the state does not follow.

  6. Employee-paid state programmes — disability, paid leave, long-term care — apply to gross salary, each with its own wage cap or none at all.

What this does not do

  • It assumes one job, held all year, at the same salary.
  • It applies the standard deduction, not itemised deductions or credits.
  • It applies only the local income taxes it can name — the cities, counties and districts held in its own registry. A levy set by the street address you live at, rather than by your state, is not in the figure and makes it too high.
  • It does not model bonuses, equity, overtime rules, or moving between states mid-year.
  • It models a filer with no dependants, so the Child Tax Credit and every other dependant-linked amount are absent. A parent's real tax is lower than the figure here.

What happens when a rate goes out of date?

Every figure carries a validity window taken from its source. Past the end of that window the tool shows a warning instead of quietly applying last year's table, because a stale number and a current one look identical to the person acting on them.

8 jurisdictions have not published every 2026 figure yet. For those, this calculator uses the prior year's table or a figure lifted from a withholding circular, and says so above the result before it shows one:

Where do these figures come from?

Each figure is transcribed from the document that publishes it — a revenue department, a statute, an agency circular — never from a summary of one.

Federal documents

State documents

A state's rate schedule, its employee-paid programmes and each local tax it allows are published separately, by different agencies and on different schedules. They are listed with their own check dates on that state's page, reachable from the state index.

Written and maintained by TakeHomeMath: each rate change is transcribed from the publishing document before it ships.

A figure that looks wrong is a defect, not a difference of opinion. Report one through the contact page and the reply names the document it was checked against.

Federal figures last checked .