Updated for 2026

US Paycheck Calculator

Estimate your take-home pay after federal taxes, Social Security, Medicare and state taxes.

What is a paycheck calculator?

A paycheck calculator, also called a take-home pay or net pay calculator, works out the gap between what you earn and what you are actually paid. Your employer does not hand you your salary divided by the number of paydays — federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, state income tax and anything you have elected to contribute all come out first. This tool applies the same published rules and shows you the number that lands in your account.

It is useful when you are weighing a job offer, deciding what a raise is really worth, choosing how much to put into a 401(k), or moving to a different state and wondering what that does to your pay.

Paid by the hour? The hourly paycheck calculator asks for your rate, your hours and any overtime, and shows your weekly and annual gross pay alongside your take-home pay. To compare a salary with an hourly rate before tax, the salary to hourly calculator turns one into the other. Expecting a one-time bonus? The bonus paycheck calculator estimates the taxes it adds for the year and what you keep after them. Offered a raise? The pay raise calculator shows it by pay period and can estimate how much of it you keep after tax. To see a single paycheck laid out line by line, from earnings to net pay, use the pay stub calculator. And to compare what one salary pays in every state, see salary after tax — for example $75,000 after tax by state.

How is take-home pay calculated?

Payroll works on the whole year and then divides, which is why this calculator does the same. The order is what makes the result correct:

  1. Start with gross pay. Salary, or hourly rate multiplied by hours worked, plus overtime, bonuses and commission.
  2. Subtract pre-tax deductions. Traditional 401(k), HSA, FSA and most health, dental and vision premiums come out before tax — but not all of them come out before the same taxes, which is the part most simple calculators get wrong.
  3. Apply FICA to one wage base. Social Security and Medicare are charged on your pay after health premiums and HSA contributions, but before your traditional 401(k) is taken out. A 401(k) contribution lowers your income tax; it does not lower your FICA.
  4. Apply federal income tax to another. Here the 401(k) does come out, the standard deduction for your filing status is subtracted, and what is left is taxed through the brackets.
  5. Apply state rules to a third. Every state defines its own taxable wage base. Pennsylvania taxes 401(k) contributions. California and New Jersey tax HSA contributions. Nine states do not tax wage income at all.
  6. Subtract post-tax deductions and divide. Whatever is left is divided by the number of paychecks in your year.

Gross pay vs net pay: what is the difference?

Gross pay is the figure in your offer letter — the full amount you earn before anything is taken out. Net pay, or take-home pay, is what reaches your bank account after taxes and deductions.

The distance between them is rarely small. For most people it is somewhere between 20% and 35% of gross, depending on income, state and benefit elections. That is why a $90,000 offer in Texas and a $90,000 offer in California are not the same offer, and why "I got a 5% raise" and "my paycheck went up 5%" are different sentences.

How do Social Security and Medicare taxes work?

Together they are called FICA, and they behave very differently from income tax: they are flat, they ignore your filing status, and they ignore the standard deduction.

  • Social Security is charged at 6.2% of your wages, but only up to an annual wage base that the Social Security Administration resets each year. Once your year-to-date earnings pass it, the tax stops for the rest of the year — which is why high earners see their paychecks grow in the fall. Your employer pays a matching 6.2% that never appears on your payslip.
  • Medicare is charged at 1.45% of your wages with no cap at all. Your employer matches it.
  • Additional Medicare Tax adds 0.9% on wages above a threshold set by filing status. Unlike the rest of FICA, your employer does not match it, and unlike the rest of FICA, the threshold is not indexed — it has been the same since 2013.

This calculator shows each of these as its own line, so you can see which part of the deduction is actually income tax and which part was never negotiable.

How does state tax affect your paycheck?

More than almost any other single factor. State income tax is calculated on top of everything federal, using rules that have nothing to do with the federal ones — different brackets, different deductions, different exemptions, sometimes different treatment of the same 401(k) dollar.

  • Nine states do not tax wage income: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.
  • A growing group charge a single flat rate on all taxable income, including Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Utah and, after recent reforms, several others.
  • The rest use progressive brackets, ranging from a top rate barely above 2% to California's top marginal rate in the teens.
  • Some add local taxes on top: New York City and Yonkers have their own income taxes, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky and Michigan have municipal or county taxes in many places.
  • Several run employee-paid payroll programs — state disability insurance, paid family and medical leave, or employee unemployment contributions — which are not income tax but come out of the same paycheck. California, New Jersey, New York, Washington, Oregon and others appear here.

This calculator carries a separate configuration for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia rather than applying an average, and shows any local or payroll items as their own lines in the breakdown.

Paycheck calculators by state

Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia has a page of its own: the same calculator, opened with that state already chosen, and a short account of what it applies there.

Frequently asked questions

Is this paycheck calculator accurate?

It applies the published federal, FICA and state rules for the tax year shown, and it is careful about the details that usually get skipped — separate wage bases for FICA and income tax, progressive brackets rather than a single rate, the Social Security wage cap, the Additional Medicare threshold, and state-specific treatment of pre-tax deductions.

It is an annualized estimate rather than an exact payroll withholding calculation. Your employer's payroll system works pay period by pay period, using the withholding methods in IRS Publication 15-T together with your year-to-date wages and withholding — information this calculator does not have — so the figure on a given paycheck can fall either side of the one shown here.

Your pay stub is the authority on what was actually withheld from a paycheck, and your tax return is the authority on what you finally owe for the year. Other things move the real number too: your employer's payroll software and its rounding, the W-4 you actually filed, benefits that start or stop mid-year, and local taxes that vary by municipality.

What is the difference between biweekly and semimonthly pay?

Biweekly means every two weeks — 26 paychecks a year, and two months in the year where you receive three of them. Semimonthly means twice a month, usually on fixed dates such as the 15th and the last day — 24 paychecks a year, every one the same size.

On the same salary, a semimonthly paycheck is about 8% larger than a biweekly one, simply because the year is divided into fewer pieces. The annual total is identical. Mixing the two up is the single most common error in take-home pay estimates, so this calculator labels them by what they mean and tells you how many paychecks each one produces.

Does contributing to a 401(k) reduce my Social Security tax?

No. A traditional 401(k) contribution reduces the wages subject to federal and most state income tax, but Social Security and Medicare are charged on your pay before the 401(k) comes out. This is deliberate: your Social Security benefit is calculated from those same wages, so sheltering them from the tax would shelter them from the benefit too.

Section 125 benefits are different. Health, dental and vision premiums and HSA contributions made through a cafeteria plan do reduce your FICA wages as well as your income tax. A Roth 401(k) reduces neither — it comes out after all tax.

Which states have no income tax?

Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming do not tax wage income. New Hampshire taxed interest and dividends until that tax was repealed, but that tax did not apply to wages. Washington has no individual income tax on wages; separate non-wage capital-gains rules are outside this paycheck calculator.

No state income tax does not always mean more money in hand — Washington's paid leave and long-term care programs, for example, are deducted from wages even though they are not income tax. The breakdown on this page shows those separately.

Why is my bonus taxed so heavily?

Usually it is not taxed more — it is withheld more. Employers commonly treat bonuses as supplemental wages and withhold federal tax at a flat 22% regardless of your bracket, or they run the bonus through the normal tables as if that were your pay every period, which pushes it into higher brackets that do not apply to your actual annual income.

Either way the excess comes back when you file. This calculator folds a bonus into your annual income and taxes it at your real rates, so the figure it shows is closer to what you keep than to what your employer withholds on the day.

What about the new 2026 deductions for tips and overtime?

They are real, and they can reach your paycheck — but not automatically. For 2026 you can deduct up to $25,000 of qualified tips and up to $12,500 of qualified overtime ($25,000 filing jointly), and the 2026 Form W-4 added both to the Step 4(b) Deductions Worksheet. Your employer only withholds less once you hand them an updated W-4 with that figure on it. Until then the money comes back as a larger refund instead.

Not everyone can claim them. If you are married, you must file a joint return to claim either deduction — married filing separately does not qualify. Both deductions also phase out at higher incomes: each one shrinks by $100 for every $1,000 of modified adjusted gross income (modified AGI) above $150,000 for single, head-of-household and other eligible filers who do not file jointly, or above $300,000 for married couples filing jointly. The 2026 W-4 is stricter: it only lets you claim them in Step 4(b) if your total income is under those same amounts, so above them whatever is left of the deduction reaches you only when you file your return.

Two details are easy to get wrong. Only the overtime premium — the extra half of time-and-a-half required by the Fair Labor Standards Act — counts as qualified overtime, not the whole overtime payment. On $30 an hour, six overtime hours are $270 of pay but only $90 of qualified premium. And qualified tips means voluntary cash or charged tips in an occupation on the IRS list; a mandatory service charge is not a tip.

Because this page cannot know whether you are exempt from the FLSA or what your occupation is, it never assumes either figure. Enter them under Advanced options if they apply to you. Neither one reduces Social Security or Medicare: those are still charged on your tips and overtime in full.

Does this calculator store or send my salary anywhere?

No. Every calculation happens in your browser using JavaScript that was loaded with the page. Your income, your state and your deductions are never sent to a server, never written to a URL, never stored, and never shared with an analytics or advertising service. There is no account to create and nothing to sign up for.

There is nowhere for it to go. This page is a set of static files, and the calculation is arithmetic your own browser performs on numbers that stay in it. No request carrying your figures is ever made, because no part of the site knows how to make one.

The site does use Google Analytics to count visits, and may show ads from Google. Those services see which page was opened, not what you typed into it. The privacy page has the detail.