Pay Desk: paycheck and pay-rule calculators
Checked on 2026-10-28. Source: IRS Publication 15-T (2026), Worksheet 1A and its "2026 Percentage Method Tables for Automated Payroll Systems and Withholding on Periodic Payments of Pensions and Annuities," pages 10 to 12. Fetched directly from irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15t.pdf and transcribed 2026-10-28.
Pay Desk answers one question as plainly as we can: what does this paycheck actually look like after taxes? Our calculators use the federal government's own withholding formula and each state's own published rules, not a rough rule of thumb, and every figure carries the source we read it from.
National tools
- Paycheck and take-home pay calculator: enter your wages, pay frequency, and filing status to see your federal withholding, Social Security, and Medicare for one pay period.
- Bonus and supplemental-wage calculator: see how a bonus is withheld under the IRS's flat-rate method, including the higher rate on a very large bonus.
- 2026 federal tax brackets: the full 2026 rate schedule and standard deduction, straight from the IRS's own inflation-adjustment release.
- No-tax-on-overtime deduction estimator: estimate the new federal deduction for qualified overtime pay, taken on your tax return, not your paycheck.
State paycheck calculators
We are building these one state at a time, each with its own sourced income-tax rule, local-tax position, minimum wage, and final-paycheck deadline. A state with no link below has not cleared our sourcing bar yet; see our Methodology and sources page for how we decide.
Why we built this
Most paycheck calculators online hide their math and never say where a number came from. We built Pay Desk the opposite way: a federal percentage-method engine transcribed directly from IRS Publication 15-T, tested against the IRS's own table rows, and a growing set of state fact files built the same way, each one with a named source and a checked-on date. If a figure changes, so does the page, and you can see when and why.
Pay Desk is free to use and supported by display advertising. We are not accountants or a payroll service, and nothing here is personalized tax advice; see our Terms for the details, and our About page for who runs the site.