What is my take home pay?

Four things stand between $100,000 of salary and $2,839.96 in your account, and only three of them are tax. Pre-tax deductions leave first: a traditional 401(k) deferral, an HSA contribution, and your share of health premiums come out before anything is computed on the rest. Then federal income tax, $13,455 at these inputs. Then Social Security and Medicare, $7,650 together. Then state income tax, $5,056 in california.

Each of those is computed on a different number, which is the part a bracket chart hides. The federal return runs on $100,000 of wages, then takes the single standard deduction of $15,750 off, so the rates only ever touch $84,250. Social Security and Medicare run on $100,000, with no deduction at all. The state return starts from the federal figure. Nobody is taxed on their salary.

The bar above is those pieces at annual size, and it is an identity rather than a chart: the five slices add back to $100,000 exactly, because each one is a computed amount and take home pay is what is left. The walk underneath is the same year divided by 26 checks, in the order a pay stub does it. The schedule is arithmetic rather than tax: the same year paid weekly is $1,419.98 on each of 52 checks, and paid monthly it is $6,153.25 on 12.

State income tax is the largest thing most people cannot see in a national calculator, and the one they are usually comparing when they run one. This table holds filing status and deductions fixed and changes only the salary and the state. Every cell is take home pay for the year: a full federal return, the real payroll computation, and a real resident state return, computed again from scratch.

At $100,000, living somewhere with no wage income tax is worth $5,056 a year against California, and $3,070 against Pennsylvania, whose flat rate is the gentlest of the four at this salary. The ranking is not fixed as income rises: a flat state charges the same share of every dollar while a graduated one keeps climbing, which is why the columns cross over as you read down the table.

Only California, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia are offered, because those are the four states whose resident return this engine computes as final for a wage earner. Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Montana and Washington have modules that come back blocked on facts a paycheck calculator cannot supply, and the rest have no module at all. A state that is not on the list would have to be approximated, so it is left off instead.

At the inputs above, the next $100 of salary is taxed at 38.6% once federal, Social Security, Medicare and state tax are all counted. The year as a whole cost 26.16% of gross pay. Both are true and they answer different questions: the first is what a raise or an extra shift is worth after tax, the second is what this job actually cost you.

The marginal figure here is measured rather than looked up. The calculator computes the whole year again at $100,100 and divides the difference by 100, so it picks up everything a bracket chart cannot: the state rate stacked on the federal one, payroll tax on the same dollar, and any threshold you happen to be sitting on. Add $10,000 of salary and take home pay rises by $6,106, which is the honest version of what a raise is worth.

Both come out before federal income tax, so both look identical on a chart of pre-tax deductions. They are not. A traditional 401(k) deferral is still wages for Social Security and Medicare, which is why your W-2 shows a smaller box 1 than boxes 3 and 5. An HSA contribution made through payroll is excluded from both.

Put $5,000 through each at the default inputs. Nothing at all leaves $73,839 of take home pay. Into the 401(k), federal income tax drops from $13,455 to $12,355 while Social Security and Medicare stay at $7,650, leaving $70,404. Into the HSA, the same federal saving arrives and payroll tax falls to $7,268, leaving $70,787. The $383 between them is the payroll tax on $5,000, and it is the reason an HSA is usually the first pre-tax dollar to fill.

Read those as smaller paychecks, not as losses. The money went into an account with your name on it. What the drivers under the calculator report is the trade at the margin: one more dollar into the 401(k) costs you less than a dollar of take home pay, because part of what you would have kept was going to tax anyway.

The state return starts from federal adjusted gross income and applies no state additions or subtractions, because that is what the engine's resident planning defaults set. Your pre-tax deductions have already come out of that figure. If your state does not follow the federal treatment of a 401(k) deferral or an HSA contribution, its own return adds that money back, and the state tax here is a floor rather than the final number.

Social Security tax applies only up to the contribution and benefit base, which this engine puts at $176,100 of wages for 2025. Medicare has no ceiling, and above a threshold that depends on filing status it gains an extra rate on top.

You can watch it happen. At $176,100 of salary, Social Security tax is $10,918.20 and Medicare is $2,553.45. At $226,100, $50,000 more, Social Security tax is still $10,918.20, exactly the same figure, while Medicare has risen to $3,278.45 plus $234.90 of additional Medicare tax. That is why a high earner's marginal rate falls a little partway through the year and never returns to where it was: the Social Security part of it is finished, and the rest is not.

The base resets every January, which is also why a raise mid-year and the same raise in January are not worth the same amount. The calculator computes a full year at a time, so it prices the year you type, not the part of it you have already been paid.

Your employer’s withholding. This is annual tax divided evenly across 26 checks. Withholding follows the Form W-4 and the Publication 15-T tables, which the payroll engine here explicitly does not implement. Expect the lines on your stub to match and the amounts to differ.

Anything that is not this salary. A second job, a spouse’s income, a bonus, self-employment, interest, dividends, capital gains, or retirement distributions all change the return, and none of them are here. Filing jointly here means one salary is the household's only wage income. If your spouse also works, the household pays federal tax on the combined amount and your share of it is higher than this shows. Your Social Security and Medicare are unaffected, because those are per person. Married filing separately and qualifying surviving spouse are not offered at all, because the state modules refuse them for a wage earner; the federal side of those statuses is at the federal income tax calculator.

City and local income tax, which New York City and Yonkers charge on top of the state return and which is not modeled here. State disability and paid family leave deductions, which come out of the same check in California and New York under their own rules. After tax deductions of every kind. Whether your contributions are inside the annual limits, which this page does not check. It also assumes the federal standard deduction rather than itemizing, and it carries one parameter year: 2025, not a history of past brackets. None of it is tax advice.

This calculator is built to be used without a browser. Every input is a query parameter on this page, and the same parameters on the JSON twin return the complete answer as a document.

GET /tools/take-home-pay.json?salary=120000&status=married-joint&state=ny&frequency=semimonthly

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with take home pay for the year and per pay period, federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare and additional Medicare separately, state income tax, the total, the wages each of those is computed on, the effective rate and a measured marginal rate across all three taxes, shares, the five slices of gross pay the composition bar draws, and computability, the engine’s own verdict on the federal and state returns, plus sensitivity across a salary ladder, every state offered, and every pay frequency, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and name the source when the default came from one, sources with a URL and an as-of date for each source the tool cites, which is an empty list on the calculators whose every default is an example input rather than a published figure, warnings, a disclaimer, and in tool the canonicalUrl and jsonUrl that carry only your non-default parameters. The canonical URL is the answer's permanent address; use it when you cite the number.

Parameters, all optional, in any order:

• salary ($ per year), default $100,000 per year.
• retirement ($ per year), default $0 per year.
• hsa ($ per year), default $0 per year.
• health ($ per year), default $0 per year.
• status (one of single, married-joint, head-of-household), default single.
• state (one of none, ca, ny, pa, va), default ca.
• frequency (one of weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly), default biweekly.

Values accept plain numbers and loose human formats such as 100k, $100,000, or 6.5%. Unknown parameters are ignored, values outside a field's range are clamped and reported in warnings, and the endpoint never fails on bad input. Responses are cacheable for a day; the defaults change when their sources publish, and tool.version changes when the method does.

• IRS Rev. Proc. 2024-40 (2025 inflation-adjusted items), as of 2025-01-01. The federal rate tables and standard deduction for tax year 2025, as published by the IRS.
• SSA cost-of-living and wage-base determinations for 2025, as of 2024-10-25. The Social Security contribution and benefit base for 2025, which is the salary above which Social Security tax stops. The payroll module reports this notice as its own authority.
• One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21), as of 2025-07-04. The statute that sets the current federal standard deduction used for 2025.
• 26 U.S.C. (Internal Revenue Code), as of 2025-01-01. The code sections the calculation implements: § 1 rates, § 63 deduction, § 3101 Social Security and Medicare, § 3101(b)(2) additional Medicare tax, § 402(g) elective deferrals, § 223 health savings accounts, § 125 cafeteria plans.

These are the parameter authorities the engine itself reports for every computation, not citations chosen after the fact. The federal rate tables and standard deduction come from the IRS revenue procedure and the statute that set them; the Social Security wage base comes from the annual cost of living announcement. The state returns report the same federal authorities plus their own forms, and the calculator names the exact line it read the state tax from, for example CA Form 540 line 64.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of a worked example at the salary you typed it can watch the checks as they land, notice the month Social Security stops coming out, and tell you what changed before you find it on a stub. Text it the question.

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