Why this exists

The problem with the existing tools

There is no shortage of salary calculators. There is a shortage of ones that answer the question properly. The three most popular each fail differently:

• One converts between pay periods beautifully and computes no tax at all, which means it cannot tell you your take-home pay — the thing you actually wanted.
• One computes tax but ignores every pre-tax deduction and all city tax. Since most employees have a 401(k) and a health plan, and since New York City alone has millions of taxpayers, its answers are wrong for a very large number of people.
• One is accurate but buries the result behind a multi-step form wrapped in sales pitches for payroll software, with jargon like "Step 4(b)" and no explanation.

None of them show their work. You type a number, you get a number, and you have no way to tell whether it is right.

What we did instead

The design goal was a calculator you could audit. Every figure on the results page traces back to a published rate, and the intermediate steps are visible:

• The federal calculation is shown bracket by bracket — taxable wages, deduction, the income falling in each band, and the tax from each. You can check it against the IRS schedule yourself.
• Social Security and Medicare are separate lines, not folded into a single "tax" figure, because they behave completely differently — one has a ceiling, one has a surtax.
• Pre-tax deductions are modelled correctly. A 401(k) reduces income tax but not FICA; health premiums, HSA and FSA reduce both. This distinction is worth real money and almost nobody implements it.
• Local income tax is included for New York City, Yonkers, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Ohio municipalities, Maryland counties, Kansas City and St. Louis.
• State payroll programmes are included — California SDI, New York PFL, New Jersey TDI and FLI, Washington's PFML and WA Cares, and others. These are mandatory deductions that competitors treat as zero.
• Every state's data is dated and rated. We publish the tax year behind each schedule and flag the states where we are approximating. See the methodology.

How it is built

51 jurisdictions, tax year 2026, as a static multi-page site. Every page — including all 51 state pages — is prerendered to plain HTML, so it loads immediately and reads correctly without JavaScript.

The tax engine is a single module shared by both the prerendered pages and the browser bundle. That matters more than it sounds: it means the figures in our reference tables and the figures in the live calculator are produced by the same code and cannot drift apart. It ships with a verification suite that checks the arithmetic against hand calculations — bracket boundaries, the Social Security wage base, the 401(k)-versus-FICA distinction, the Yonkers surcharge, and the reverse net-to-gross solver.

The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

What this is not

This is an estimator for planning, not tax advice, and not a substitute for an accountant on anything consequential. We model annual tax liability; your employer withholds by a different method, and the gap between the two is what produces a refund or a bill. We cover wage income only — no capital gains, self-employment income, or rental income.

If you find an error

We would rather know than not. Tell us the jurisdiction and the correct figure — with the published schedule behind it if you have one — and we will fix it and update the reviewed date on that state's page. Our contact form sets out the five lines that make a report reproducible.

The other two pages worth knowing about: our privacy policy, which is short because the calculator never sends your salary anywhere, and our terms and conditions, which state plainly that this is an estimator for planning rather than tax advice.