Enter a gross salary, filing status, and pay frequency to estimate net take-home pay after federal tax and FICA.
How to Use the Take-Home Paycheck Calculator
Enter your gross annual salary, pick Single or Married Filing Jointly, and choose how often you're paid — Annual, Monthly, Biweekly, or Weekly only changes how the results are divided up for display. The three optional fields below — state/local tax rate, pre-tax 401(k) percent, and pre-tax insurance — default to zero and are yours to fill in if they apply.
Federal income tax runs through the actual 2026 bracket structure for the filing status you picked, after subtracting the standard deduction and any pre-tax 401(k) or insurance amounts from gross pay. Social Security is withheld at 6.2% up to the $184,500 wage base for 2026, past which it stops; Medicare is a flat 1.45% with no cap, plus an extra 0.9% on wages above $200,000 (single) or $250,000 (joint) — a surtax unchanged since it was introduced in 2013 and not adjusted for inflation the way the brackets are.
What this leaves out matters as much as what it includes: no specific state's tax tables (several states charge no income tax at all, others tax heavily — hence the flat, editable estimate instead of a lookup), no local taxes some cities levy on top, no pre-tax HSA/FSA contributions beyond the generic insurance field, and none of a real W-4's withholding-allowance quirks. Treat the result as a solid estimate of take-home pay, not a paystub.
Taxable Income = Gross − 401(k) − Insurance − Standard Deduction
FICA = (Gross − 401(k)) × 7.65% + Additional Medicare Surtax where applicableFigures are sourced from the Tax Foundation's 2026 federal bracket and standard deduction projections and the Social Security Administration's 2026 wage base; verify both directly at irs.gov and ssa.gov before relying on this for anything beyond a ballpark.