Take-Home Pay Calculator

On a $62,400 salary paid every other week, the gross figure on the stub is $2,400.00 and the figure that reaches the bank, before any benefit deduction, is $2,012.25. The $387.75 in between is four separate subtractions, taken in a fixed order, each one governed by a different rule: $204.15 of estimated federal income tax, $148.80 of Social Security, $34.80 of Medicare, and whatever your state takes. That is 16.16% of gross, and almost none of it is the number people expect.

This page walks down that stub one line at a time. For each line: what the figure is, which IRS publication fixes it, and what the calculator above cannot see. The last two sections are the ones worth reading twice, because they are where the estimate stops being arithmetic and starts being a guess.

Line 1 — gross for the period

Everything else is a percentage of this, so an error here is an error everywhere. The calculator divides your annual salary by the number of pay periods in the year. Your employer does the reverse, and the period counts both of you have to use are not a convention — they are printed in the IRS withholding publication. Pub 15-T's Table 3, the one a payroll system reads before it does anything else, lists Semiannually 2, Quarterly 4, Monthly 12, Semimonthly 24, Biweekly 26, Weekly 52, Daily 260.

Change the frequency selector and watch what moves. The same $62,400 produces $1,200.00 a week, $2,400.00 a fortnight, $2,600.00 twice a month, or $5,200.00 a month — and an estimated deposit of $1,006.12, $2,012.25, $2,179.93 or $4,359.87. The annual figure does not move at all. Frequency changes the size of each slice, not the size of the cake. If you are trying to work out whether 26 paychecks is better than 24, the answer is in the biweekly paycheck calculator, which handles the calendar question properly; it is not in this page.

Line 2 — Social Security, 6.2% until it stops

Publication 15 (Circular E) for 2026 is blunt about this: “The rate of social security tax on taxable wages is 6.2% each for the employer and employee. The social security wage base limit is $184,500.” On our $2,400 fortnight that is $148.80, and on a salary below $184,500 it is $148.80 in January and $148.80 in December.

Above the base it behaves in a way that surprises people every year, because it does not taper and it is not spread out. It simply stops, mid-paycheck, on the day your year-to-date wages reach $184,500, and nothing is withheld for the rest of the year. Two worked cases from the engine behind this page:

• $190,000, biweekly. Twenty-five paychecks at $453.08, then the twenty-sixth charges only $112.08, because only $1,807.69 of that paycheck is still below the base. That last fortnight of the year is $341.00 bigger than the others for no reason anyone announces.
• $240,000, biweekly. Social Security runs at $572.31 through paycheck 19, charges $565.15 on paycheck 20, and is $0.00 from paycheck 21 onward.

The result panel above shows the first paycheck of the year. For anyone under the wage base that figure holds all year. For anyone over it, the real Social Security line falls off a cliff partway through and the panel will not tell you when.

Line 3 — Medicare has no ceiling, and gains 0.9% above $200,000

Pub 15 gives the base rate in the same sentence as Social Security: “The Medicare tax rate is 1.45% each for the employee and employer.” There is no wage base. On $2,400 it is $34.80 and it is still 1.45% on your ten-millionth dollar.

On top of that sits the Additional Medicare Tax, 0.9%, and the rule your employer follows is not the rule you settle up on. IRS Topic no. 560 puts the employer's duty at wages “paid to an employee for the year exceeds $200,000”, and that $200,000 does not vary with filing status. Your own threshold does: $250,000 if you are married filing jointly, $125,000 married filing separately, $200,000 for everyone else, and those are settled on the return rather than in payroll. Two consequences people meet the hard way. A single filer earning $240,000 has the extra 0.9% withheld from paycheck 22 onward — $27.69 on that paycheck, rising to $83.08 by paycheck 26 as more of the fortnight sits above the line. A married couple each earning $150,000 has nothing withheld by either employer, and owes the 0.9% on $50,000 when they file.

Line 4 — federal income tax, the least reliable line on the page

The figures underneath this line are correct and current. For 2026 the standard deduction is $16,100 for a single filer, $32,200 married filing jointly and $24,150 for head of household, and the bracket thresholds run 10% up to $12,400 of taxable income, then 12% over $12,400, 22% over $50,400, 24% over $105,700, 32% over $201,775, 35% over $256,225 and 37% over $640,600 (single; the married filing jointly figures are $24,800 / $100,800 / $211,400 / $403,550 / $512,450 / $768,700). Those come from the IRS's own announcement of the 2026 inflation adjustments and from Revenue Procedure 2025-32 behind it, and we checked the calculator's table against the Revenue Procedure band by band.

On $62,400 single: $62,400 less the $16,100 standard deduction is $46,300 of taxable income, which produces $5,308 of annual federal tax, which is the $204.15 a fortnight shown above.

Here is the problem. That is an estimate of what you will owe, divided by 26. It is not what your employer will withhold, and the two are computed by different machinery. A payroll system runs IRS Pub 15-T Worksheet 1A, which starts by taking the wages of this one period and annualising them: line 1a is “Enter the employee's total taxable wages this payroll period”, line 1b the number of pay periods, and line 1c “Multiply the amount on line 1a by the number on line 1b”. It then adds your Form W-4 Step 4(a) other income, subtracts Step 4(b) deductions, and subtracts a deduction allowance from line 1g of “$12,900 if the taxpayer is married filing jointly or $8,600 otherwise”.

Nothing on this page asks you for a W-4 entry, so nothing on this page can reproduce that worksheet. If you have dependents, a second job, other income or extra withholding requested on your W-4, the federal line here will be wrong in your favour or against you, and the W-4 withholding estimator is the page that at least asks the questions.

Line 5 — state income tax, where this page helps least

The state field takes one flat percentage. No state levies income tax that way. Some have a single rate and a flat percentage is nearly right for them; most have graduated brackets, their own standard deduction or personal exemption that differs from the federal one, and their own treatment of pre-tax deductions. Several have no wage income tax at all, in which case 0 is the honest entry.

Two mechanical things worth knowing about the field itself. It applies your percentage to gross wages after any 401(k) deferral you enter, which matches most states and is wrong for at least one — see the 401(k) paycheck impact page for the Pennsylvania case and the arithmetic. And the engine will not use a rate above 20: type 50 and it computes 20, with no warning on screen.

Local income tax — city, county, school district — is not modelled at all, at any rate. If your stub has a line for it, this page is missing it entirely.

What is missing from the stub altogether

The gap between this page's estimate and your actual deposit is usually not tax. It is benefits, and the biggest of them is pre-tax by design. Pub 15's table of special rules lists cafeteria plan benefits under section 125 and notes that “Benefits provided under cafeteria plans may qualify for exclusion from wages for social security, Medicare, and FUTA taxes” — which is why a health premium taken through a cafeteria plan reduces not just your taxable income but your Social Security and Medicare wages too, and why subtracting it from this page's answer by hand still leaves you with the wrong number.

Not modelled here, in rough order of how often they show up on a real stub: medical, dental and vision premiums; health savings account and flexible spending account contributions; group life insurance above the excludable amount; commuter benefits; union dues; Roth 401(k) and after-tax contributions, which do not reduce taxable wages at all; loan repayments to a 401(k); garnishments and child support orders; and employer-side taxes, which never appear on your stub because you do not pay them.

What the Annualized block actually is

This is the most important paragraph on the page, and we would rather print it than let you assume otherwise. The two annual figures in the result panel are built from the year's own components, not from this paycheck multiplied out. Below the Social Security wage base the two routes agree to the cent, because every paycheck in the year really is identical: on $80,000 the annual estimate and a full year-by-year sum are the same figure.

Above the base they part company, which is why the annual rows are not a multiplication. Social Security stops once your year-to-date wages reach $184,500 and Additional Medicare Tax starts once they pass $200,000, so no single paycheck scales to a year. At $240,000 paid biweekly the first paycheck's Social Security is $572.31, and twenty-six of those would be $14,880.00 — while 6.2% of the $184,500 wage base is $11,439.00, and that is what the annual row charges. The annual take-home reads $176,617.00 and the effective rate 26.41%. Until 3 October 2026 these rows were this paycheck times a year, which read $173,536.00 and 27.69%, $3,081.00 light on the take-home.

Three checks against your real paystub

If you want to know whether this estimate is any use to you, these take two minutes with a stub in front of you.

1. Divide the Social Security line by your gross for the period. It should be 0.062 to the fourth decimal. If it is lower, you are over the wage base and part of the year is already unwithheld. If there is no Social Security line at all, you may be in employment that is exempt, and nothing here applies.
2. Divide the Medicare line by gross. 0.0145 exactly, or 0.0235 if the extra 0.9% has started. Anything else means the Medicare wage is not the gross — usually a cafeteria-plan premium coming out first.
3. Subtract this page's estimated net from your actual net. The remainder is your benefits, your local tax, and the distance between an annual-liability sketch and real Pub 15-T withholding. That remainder, not the estimate, is the number worth investigating.

Sources

• IRS Publication 15 (Circular E), Employer's Tax Guide, 2026 — the 6.2% Social Security rate and the $184,500 wage base; the 1.45% Medicare rate; and the section 15 table of special rules, which is where cafeteria plan benefits under section 125 and their Social Security, Medicare and FUTA treatment are set out.
• IRS Publication 15-T, Federal Income Tax Withholding Methods, 2026 — Table 3's pay-period counts (52 / 26 / 24 / 12 / 260), and Worksheet 1A Step 1, which annualises a single period's wages and applies the Form W-4 entries and the $12,900 / $8,600 deduction allowance. This is the computation your employer runs and this page does not.
• IRS Topic no. 560, Additional Medicare Tax — the 0.9% rate, the employer's $200,000 withholding trigger that ignores filing status, and the taxpayer thresholds of $250,000 / $125,000 / $200,000 that are settled on the return.
• IRS, tax inflation adjustments for tax year 2026 and Revenue Procedure 2025-32 — the 2026 standard deduction of $16,100 / $32,200 / $24,150 and the full bracket tables we checked the calculator against.

Part of the PaystubKit tools collection. Calculations run locally in your browser. Estimates only, not tax advice.