Take-Home Pay & Income Tax Calculator

How to use

Enter your annual gross salary, pick the tax year, and choose your filing status — single, married filing jointly, married filing separately, or head of household. Set the pay frequency to match your payroll (weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly) and the result is broken down per paycheck as well as per year. Optionally add pre-tax deductions such as 401(k) contributions, as an amount or a percentage, and pick your state from the presets or type a rate. The calculator shows your estimated take-home pay with a full line-item breakdown of federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and any state tax.

How US take-home pay is calculated

Your paycheck is your gross salary minus several deductions. First, the standard deduction (and any pre-tax contributions) is subtracted to get your taxable income. Federal income tax is then applied through progressive brackets: each slice of income is taxed at its own rate, so a raise never lowers your net pay.

On top of income tax, FICA payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare. Social Security is 6.2% of wages up to an annual cap; Medicare is 1.45% of all wages, with an additional 0.9% on high earnings. These are calculated on your gross wages, not your taxable income — which is why pre-tax deductions lower your income tax but not your FICA.

What does that leave in each paycheck?

The annual figure is the one that matters for tax; the per-paycheck figure is the one you actually budget against, so the calculator shows both. Two pay schedules get confused constantly and they are not the same thing:

• Bi-weekly — 26 paychecks. Paid every two weeks, so two months each year contain three paydays. Budgeting as though every month has two is the classic mistake; those two extra cheques are the easiest windfall in personal finance to plan for.
• Semi-monthly — 24 paychecks. Paid twice a month, usually the 15th and the last day. Each cheque is about 8% larger than the bi-weekly equivalent and lands on predictable dates, which makes rent and mortgage timing simpler.

One honest caveat: this divides your annual net evenly across the periods you choose. Real payroll withholds tax period by period, and things like hitting the Social Security wage base partway through the year mean your later paychecks can be slightly larger than your earlier ones. Expect a few dollars of difference against your payslip, not a few hundred.

How much does your state change the answer?

More than most people expect — state income tax runs from nothing at all to over 13%. On a $100,000 salary the gap between Texas and California is roughly $9,000 a year of net pay, which is larger than most raises. The calculator ships presets for the states with genuinely flat rates (Arizona, Indiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts) plus a zero-tax option covering Florida, Texas, Washington, Nevada, Tennessee, Wyoming, South Dakota and Alaska.

Where we're approximating, we say so: New York and California use progressive brackets of their own, so their presets are single effective-rate estimates rather than a real bracket walk. City taxes — New York City and Yonkers being the ones that catch people out — aren't included at all. If you need a precise figure for a bracketed state, treat the result here as the federal-plus-FICA number and add your state's own calculation on top.

Marginal vs. effective rate

Your marginal rate is the rate on your last dollar earned — the bracket you're currently in. Your effective rate is your total tax divided by your gross salary, and it's always lower because most of your income is taxed at the lower brackets beneath your top one. Confusing the two is the most common tax misconception.

Worked example

Take a $100,000 salary for a single filer in 2026. After the standard deduction, taxable income is about $83,900. Running that through the brackets (10%, 12%, then 22%) gives roughly $13,170 in federal income tax. Add Social Security ($6,200) and Medicare ($1,450) for $7,650 of FICA. Total deductions come to about $20,820 — an effective rate near 21% — leaving take-home pay of roughly $79,180, even though the marginal rate is 22%.

What to do with what's left

Net pay is the number every other financial decision is actually made against, and lenders and planners both work backwards from it rather than from your gross salary:

• Housing. The common guideline is to keep housing under 28–30% of gross, but the version that protects you is the same share of net. Take the monthly take-home figure above, decide what fraction you're willing to commit, then work out what size loan that monthly payment supports — and remember the payment there is principal and interest only, before property tax and insurance.
• Investing the surplus. Whatever is left after housing and living costs is the number worth compounding. Even a modest monthly amount changes shape over twenty years, and it's worth seeing the arithmetic rather than trusting intuition: project a monthly investment forward at a realistic return.
• Pre-tax first, usually. Before either of the above, note that raising your 401(k) contribution lowers your federal income tax immediately — so the true cost of saving more is less than the amount you divert. Change the deduction field above and watch net pay fall by less than the contribution does.

Tips and common mistakes

• A raise into a new bracket won't cut your pay. Only the income above the threshold is taxed at the higher rate.
• Pick the right filing status before anything else. It changes both the standard deduction and the bracket thresholds, so it moves the answer more than a state rate usually does. If you married during the tax year, you can generally file jointly for the whole of it — worth checking both statuses above.
• Pre-tax contributions save income tax, not FICA. 401(k) and similar deductions lower taxable income but Social Security and Medicare still apply to gross.
• This excludes credits. Tax credits (child, education, etc.) can reduce your actual tax further and aren't modeled here.