About MoneyCalc

What this site does

MoneyCalc estimates what happens to your pay between what an employer agrees to and what reaches your bank account. It covers five calculations for each of the 51 U.S. jurisdictions: a paycheck calculator, a salary-after-tax calculator, an overtime calculator, a bonus tax calculator and a 1099 self-employment tax calculator.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type into a calculator is transmitted to a server, stored, or logged. There is no account to create and no email to hand over.

Why state-specific

Most quick paycheck calculators apply a single generic state rate and call it done. That produces numbers that are wrong in interesting ways. Some examples of what the generic approach misses:

• Pennsylvania taxes 401(k) contributions in the year you make them. A calculator that assumes federal treatment overstates a Pennsylvania take-home figure for anyone contributing to a retirement plan.
• Ohio and Maryland have local income taxes that frequently exceed the state tax. Ignoring them is not a rounding error.
• California removed the wage cap on State Disability Insurance in 2024, so high earners now pay it on their whole salary.
• Washington has no income tax but two employee-paid payroll programmes, which is the entire state deduction picture there.
• Alabama allows an uncapped deduction for federal income tax paid, which quietly lowers the effective state rate as income rises.

Each state page is built from a configuration file holding that state’s brackets, deductions, exemptions, payroll taxes, supplemental wage rate, minimum wage, overtime rules and source URLs. The page copy is generated from that data, which is why a Texas page and a New Jersey page say substantially different things.

Where the numbers come from

Federal figures come from the IRS: the annual rate schedules and standard deduction from the applicable revenue procedure, withholding methods from Publication 15-T, and FICA rates and the Social Security wage base from the IRS and the Social Security Administration. State figures come from each state’s own department of revenue, taxation or labor.

Every state configuration stores the URLs it was built from, and those sources are published on each state page under “Sources & methodology”. We do not cite secondary aggregators.

How we label data we are not sure about

Tax data goes stale. States pass rate cuts mid-year, index brackets to inflation, and publish new tables on their own schedules. Rather than present every state as equally certain, each configuration carries one of three labels:

• Verified (7 jurisdictions) — transcribed from the cited primary source for tax year 2026.
• Provisional (43 jurisdictions) — built on the most recently confirmed published tables, which may predate 2026. The state page says which year the tables come from and shows a banner.
• Not estimated (1 jurisdiction) — the rate schedule is mid-transition and we will not publish a state figure we cannot stand behind. Federal figures on those pages are still calculated in full.

We would rather show you a visible caveat than a confident wrong number.

What these calculators are not

They estimate withholding — roughly what payroll takes out of a paycheck. That is not the same as your final tax liability, which is settled when you file a return and depends on credits, itemized deductions, other income, and circumstances no calculator can see.

Not modeled: the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, education credits, itemized deductions, the qualified business income deduction, the Alternative Minimum Tax, most state-level credits, and multi-state or remote-work allocation. Each state page lists its own specific limitations, and we encourage reading them.

Read the full disclaimer for what this means in practice.

How the site pays for itself

MoneyCalc is free to use. We intend to fund it with display advertising. Ads, when they appear, will be clearly labelled and kept away from the calculator controls and results so they cannot be clicked by accident. We do not accept payment for placement, do not write sponsored content, and do not recommend financial products.

Corrections

If a rate on this site is wrong, we want to know. Send the state, the figure you believe is incorrect, and a link to the official source, and we will check it against the primary document. Get in touch.