Methodology & sources

A paycheck calculator that will not say where its brackets came from is asking you to trust an anonymous number with a decision about your money. This page exists so you do not have to. Everything below is what the code on this site actually uses, current for tax year 2026.

Primary sources

• Federal brackets and standard deduction: IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, the inflation-adjustment procedure for tax year 2026, including the amendments made by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
• Social Security wage base: the Social Security Administration's Contribution and Benefit Base.
• State flat income-tax rates: Tax Foundation, state individual income tax rates as of January 1, 2026.
• Graduated-state effective rates: ITEP, Who Pays? (7th edition), which publishes effective state income-tax rates by income group.

These figures were retrieved on 22 August 2026 and are reviewed when the IRS publishes its annual adjustments, normally in the autumn preceding the tax year.

Federal income tax

Federal tax is computed the way the IRS computes it: marginal, bracket by bracket, on taxable income after the standard deduction. Income in a bracket is taxed at that bracket's rate. Moving into a higher bracket never reduces take-home pay, a misconception the marginal versus effective rate guide covers in detail.

Standard deduction for 2026:

Marginal brackets for a single filer, 2026:

Married-filing-jointly and head-of-household brackets follow the same structure at the thresholds published in Rev. Proc. 2025-32. Married filing separately uses the single amounts.

FICA: Social Security and Medicare

• Social Security: 6.20% of wages up to the 2026 wage base of $184,500. Earnings above the base are not subject to it, which is why very high earners see their effective payroll rate fall partway through the year.
• Medicare: 1.45% of all wages, with no cap.
• Additional Medicare Tax: a further 0.9% withheld on wages above $200,000, regardless of filing status.

These are the employee shares. Employers pay a matching share of Social Security and Medicare which is not deducted from your pay and is therefore not shown, except in the self-employment calculator, where you pay both halves.

State income tax, and where the estimates are

Exact: no-tax states

9 states levy no tax on wage income: AK, FL, NV, NH, SD, TN, TX, WA, WY. For these the state figure is zero, and that is exact.

Computed from statute: 42 states

For these we apply the state's own 2026 rate schedule to income after that state's standard deduction and personal exemption, not to your whole salary. That distinction is worth real money: Colorado starts from federal taxable income, so a $65,000 salary there is taxed on about $48,900, not $65,000.

Eight of them tax nothing at all below a threshold: Mississippi above $10,000, Ohio above $26,050, Delaware above $2,000, Missouri above $1,348, Oklahoma above $3,750, North Dakota above $48,475, Arkansas above $5,600 and Vermont above $3,925 of taxable income, which is why none can be treated as a plain flat rate. In five more, the relief itself depends on what you earn: Wisconsin's and Alabama's shrink as income rises, South Carolina's SCIAD tapers over a $55,000 band, Connecticut's exemption disappears entirely by $45,000, and Maryland's deduction is 15% of income between a floor and a cap.

Every figure here was checked on 6 September 2026 against a source independent of the aggregate table we cite, using a state revenue department wherever one published the numbers. The aggregate table was stale or wrong in ten places.

• Georgia at 5.19%, cut to 4.99% by HB 463, retroactive to 1 January.
• Utah at 4.50%, cut to 4.45% by SB 60.
• West Virginia at 2.22%-4.82%, cut about 5% for 2026 to 2.11%-4.58%.
• Arizona's standard deduction at $8,350, when Arizona conforms to the federal $16,100.
• Maine's standard deduction at $8,350, when Maine Revenue Services publishes $15,300.
• South Carolina's whole schedule, which Act 110 replaced for 2026 with two brackets and a new deduction.
• Ohio and Mississippi listed as plain flat rates, when each taxes nothing below a threshold.
• New Jersey's fourth bracket rounded to 5.53%, where the statute says 5.525%.
• Hawaii's standard deduction at $4,400, which Act 46 raises to $8,000 for 2026.
• Montana's brackets at the pre-2026 thresholds, which HB 337 lifted to $47,500 / $95,000.
• Arkansas's top rate at 3.9%, when the DFA withholding formula in force for 2026 tops out at 3.70%.
• The District of Columbia as six brackets topping at 10.75% above $500,000, when the Office of Tax and Revenue publishes seven, with 9.75% running to $1M.

We would rather print that list than imply a single source settles it. Each correction is pinned by an assertion in the test suite, so changing the data back to match the aggregator fails the build.

What each of these deliberately leaves out:

• AZ: the $100-per-dependent credit.
• GA: the $5,000-per-dependent exemption.
• IN: county income tax, which every Indiana county levies at 0.5%–3%.
• MA: the 4% surtax on income above roughly $1,083,150.
• MI: city income taxes, such as Detroit at 2.4%.
• OH: the personal exemption ($2,400, tiering down by AGI) and municipal income tax of 1%–2.5%.
• PA: local earned income tax, about 1% in most municipalities.
• UT: the Utah taxpayer credit, which phases out as income rises.
• AL: the deduction for federal income tax paid, which Alabama allows, and city occupational taxes.
• MD: the county income tax of 1.75%–3.2% that every Maryland county and Baltimore City levies on top.
• MO: the 1% earnings tax charged by Kansas City and St. Louis.
• NJ: the income-based phase-out of New Jersey exemptions.
• NM: New Mexico's $4,000 per-dependent exemption.
• OR: Oregon's subtraction for federal income tax paid, worth up to $7,050.
• WI: the phase-out of the standard deduction for joint filers, which is not modeled here.
• CT: Connecticut's tax recapture and 3% phase-out add-back, which raise the bill at higher incomes.
• RI: the phase-out of the deduction and exemptions, which begins at $261,000 of income.
• AR: the low-income tax tables, which exempt roughly the first $14,600 of a single filer's wages and more with dependents, and the $29-per-dependent credit.
• DC: the DC earned-income and low-income credits, and the itemized-deduction limitation above $200,000 of AGI.
• VT: Vermont's 2026 annual rate schedule, which the Department has not yet published — this follows its 2026 withholding tables and assumes one W-4VT allowance per filer.
• CA: the renter's credit, the low-income exemption below $18,896 of wages, and SDI — which is a real deduction on every California paycheck and is carried separately in PAYROLL_2026.
• NY: New York City and Yonkers income tax, the household credit, and Method III — which above $1,077,550 applies a flat rate to all wages rather than marginally, and collects materially more than this schedule.

Estimated: none

California and New York used an effective-rate model until September 2026. On $85,000 of single income the California estimate returned about $1,167 against roughly $3,700 of statutory tax. ITEP's Who Pays? measures effective rates across every household in an income band (retirees, itemisers, families drawing refundable credits), so it was never capable of pricing one wage earner, and the ESTIMATE label did not make a threefold understatement safe to publish. Both now compute from their state's own exact-calculation schedule, and nothing on this site is estimated.

Asked, not guessed: none left

Three jurisdictions sat here until September 2026: Arkansas, the District of Columbia and Vermont. Secondary sources contradicted one another, so the calculator asked you for your own rate rather than invent one. All three are now computed from statute. Each was settled the same way: by reading the state's own revenue department instead of trying to reconcile the aggregators, which is also how two more errors in the list above came to light.

What these calculators deliberately do not model

The gap between a good estimate and your actual paycheck is almost always one of these:

• Local and city taxes. New York City, Philadelphia, and many Ohio and Pennsylvania municipalities levy their own income taxes. None are included.
• Itemised deductions. Every calculation uses the standard deduction. If you itemise, your taxable income differs.
• Tax credits. The Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, education and dependent-care credits and their state equivalents are not modelled. Credits reduce tax owed directly, so for lower-income households with children the real figure can be substantially better than shown.
• Pre-tax deductions you do not enter. Health insurance premiums, HSA and FSA contributions, commuter benefits and similar reduce taxable wages. Where a calculator accepts them it uses them; where it does not, they are not assumed.
• Other income. Investment income, rental income, a second job and a spouse's earnings all change your bracket. Calculators model the income you enter.
• Your employer's actual withholding. Withholding is driven by the W-4 on file and your employer's payroll system, and is designed to approximate your liability across the year rather than to match it exactly. A refund or a bill at filing time is the normal outcome of that gap.
• Alternative Minimum Tax, NIIT and phase-outs affecting high earners.

The non-tax calculators

Mortgage, loan and credit-card payoff figures use the standard amortisation formula for a fixed-rate instalment loan. Compound interest and savings-goal projections use standard compound-growth formulas at the rate and frequency you enter. Retirement and 401(k) projections compound contributions at an assumed constant annual return, which is a modelling convenience and not a forecast. Real markets do not deliver a constant return, and sequence of returns materially affects outcomes.

Mortgage results cover principal and interest. Property tax, homeowner's insurance, PMI and HOA dues are substantial and are not included unless a calculator explicitly asks for them.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, that is worth knowing and it gets fixed. Reports go to the contact page and are read by the person who wrote the code. Naming the calculator, your inputs, the result you got and the result you expected makes a report far easier to act on.

Using this data

The rates themselves are public law, and we claim no ownership of them. Every figure on this page names the department document it came from, so you can read the same source we did. What took the work is the compilation: selecting, reconciling and re-verifying all 51 jurisdictions against their own revenue authorities, which is a continuing commitment.

You are welcome to use these calculators, cite them, and link to them. Bulk extraction of the underlying tables (by scraping the site, the page assets or any bundled data file) and redistribution of them as a dataset or as a competing service, is not permitted. That includes using them to train or populate a product that supplies tax figures to others.

If you want the tables programmatically, that is a product: Withholdwell serves them as an API with a free tier, published pricing and a versioned annual data export, each figure carrying the source it was read from and a data_version you can pin. Licensing it also buys the thing a scrape cannot: the next year's verification, and notice when a released table turns out to be wrong.

Not financial advice

SalarySmith provides general educational estimates. It is not tax, investment, legal or financial advice, and it does not account for your particular circumstances. For decisions that matter (a large purchase, a retirement strategy, an unusual tax situation), consult a qualified professional such as a CPA, an enrolled agent or a fiduciary financial adviser.