Paycheck Calculator

Start with your gross pay for the period, then take out four things: pre-tax deductions like a 401k percentage and health insurance, federal income tax on what remains after the standard deduction, FICA (6.2% Social Security plus 1.45% Medicare), and your state's income tax. What's left is your take-home pay. This paycheck calculator runs all of those steps at once and shows each line, so you'll see exactly where every dollar goes instead of just the final number.

FICA is the federal payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare. You pay 6.2% of your wages toward Social Security up to the annual wage base ($176,100 for 2025) and 1.45% toward Medicare on every dollar, with an extra 0.9% Medicare surtax once wages pass $200,000. Your employer matches the 6.2% and 1.45% on top, but that match doesn't come out of your check. Unlike income tax, FICA isn't reduced by the standard deduction or your 401k contributions.

It depends on your taxable income and filing status, because federal tax is layered in brackets rather than one flat rate. For 2025, a single filer pays 10% on the first $11,925 of taxable income, 12% up to $48,475, then 22%, 24%, and beyond. Taxable income is your gross pay minus pre-tax deductions and the standard deduction ($15,000 single, $30,000 married filing jointly). That's why your effective rate is usually far lower than your top bracket.

A few common reasons. Your W-4 settings (extra withholding, dependents, a second job) change what your employer holds back, and withholding is a prepayment that gets settled at tax time, not the tax itself. Local city taxes, state disability insurance, Roth 401k contributions, and after-tax benefits also shift the number. This tool estimates the tax you'd actually owe spread evenly across paychecks, which is a solid planning figure, but it isn't a payroll system and it isn't tax advice.

Traditional 401k contributions lower your federal and (in most states) state income tax right away, because they come out before income tax is figured. Put in 5% of a $60,000 salary and $3,000 of income escapes income tax this year. They don't reduce FICA, though, so Social Security and Medicare are still charged on that money. Pre-tax health insurance premiums are even better on that front, since they usually skip both income tax and FICA.

Biweekly means every two weeks, which works out to 26 paychecks a year, while semimonthly means twice a month, or 24 paychecks. The same salary gets sliced into more, smaller checks on biweekly: $60,000 is about $2,308 gross per biweekly check versus $2,500 semimonthly. Twice a year, biweekly employees get a third check in a month, which is why the two schedules feel so different even though the annual total matches.

Enter your state's rate as a single flat percentage in the state field. Nine states, including Texas and Florida, take nothing, so enter 0. Flat-tax states like Colorado (4.4%) or Illinois (4.95%) are exact with one number. For bracketed states like California or New York, enter your rough effective rate, often 3% to 6% for middle incomes, and treat the state line as a ballpark. The federal and FICA lines aren't affected by this field either way.