About

What SalarySmith is

SalarySmith is a set of free calculators for the money questions people actually have to answer: what a salary leaves you after tax in your state, what a mortgage or a loan really costs, how a bonus is withheld, what a 401(k) contribution does to your take-home pay, whether one job offer beats another, and what self-employment tax adds up to.

Every calculator runs in your browser and works without an account. There is an optional Assay Master membership that keeps a dated ledger of your saved results and removes the ads, but nothing behind it changes what the calculators compute.

Why it exists

Paycheck calculators are everywhere and most of them share two problems. They will not tell you where their tax figures came from, and they will not tell you what they left out, so you cannot judge whether the number applies to you.

A federal bracket table is a published fact with a document number, and a calculator that will not cite it is asking for trust it has not earned. Meanwhile the gap between a clean estimate and a real payslip is almost always something specific and nameable: a city tax, a credit, a pre-tax deduction, a state whose brackets interact with its own credits in ways no general tool can model.

SalarySmith publishes both. The methodology page lists every source by name and document number, and states plainly which state figures are exact and which are estimates. Results in the estimated states are labelled as estimates wherever they appear.

Where the figures come from

All tax figures are current for tax year 2026 and trace to primary sources:

• Federal brackets and the standard deduction from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, the annual inflation-adjustment procedure.
• The Social Security wage base from the Social Security Administration's published Contribution and Benefit Base.
• State flat rates from the Tax Foundation's survey of state individual income tax rates as of 1 January 2026.
• Graduated-state effective rates from ITEP's Who Pays? (7th edition), used as an explicitly-labelled estimate where exact modelling is not honestly possible.

The full detail, including the bracket tables themselves and a list of what the calculators deliberately do not model, is on the methodology page.

What it will not do

• Claim precision it does not have. Where a state figure is an estimate, it says so on the result.
• Model your local taxes, credits or itemised deductions. Those are listed on the methodology page as known gaps rather than quietly omitted.
• Replace a professional. These are educational estimates. For a decision that matters, a CPA, an enrolled agent or a fiduciary adviser is worth what they cost.
• Transmit your figures. Calculations run on your device. Your salary reaches us only if you sign in and explicitly save a result.
• Sell your data. There is no version of this site where your income is the product.

Who builds it

SalarySmith is designed, written and maintained by a single independent developer working as Studio Ropewalk, LLC, a limited liability company registered in North Carolina, United States. The calculation engine is implemented from the primary sources above and covered by an automated test suite that checks each formula against worked examples; the guides and the methodology page were written by hand by the same person.

There is no back office and no support queue. Messages sent through the contact page are read by the person who wrote the code. If a figure on this site is wrong, that is worth knowing and it gets fixed, because people make real decisions on these numbers.

How it is funded

SalarySmith is free and stays free. It is paid for by display advertising in fixed slots on the page, plus the optional Assay Master membership, which keeps a ledger of saved results and removes the ads. Your figures are not part of the deal: they are computed on your device and never transmitted unless you deliberately save one. The privacy policy covers exactly what is stored and what advertising partners set.

Not financial advice

Everything on this site is general educational information, not tax, investment, legal or financial advice, and it cannot account for your particular circumstances. Tax law changes, and figures published here may lag a change. For decisions of consequence, consult a qualified professional.

Where to start

The paycheck calculator is the one most people want. If you would rather understand the mechanics first, the guides cover marginal versus effective tax rates, how withholding works, what happens to a bonus, and how to compare two job offers properly.