About Plain Paycheck

Plain Paycheck works out what a US salary actually pays after tax in 2026. Pick a state, enter a salary, and the page breaks the result into separate lines: federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, state income tax, and 401(k), instead of one number with no working shown. All 50 states and the District of Columbia are covered. The math is computed in your browser, and there is no signup.

Plain Paycheck is built and run by one person, Arunavo Ray of RayLabs, with AI assistance on the code.

The tax data follows a stricter rule than the code does. Every federal and state figure is checked against at least two sources, with the government's own document preferred: the IRS and the Social Security Administration for federal figures, a state's department of revenue for its own tables. A state whose 2026 figures cannot be verified is left off the site rather than published as a guess.

Each jurisdiction's math is also pinned by a worked-example test, recomputed from the source documents, so a later edit cannot quietly move a number without the test failing first. Every page lists the documents its figures came from, at the bottom, under Sources. The methodology page has the full account, including the mistakes this checking has already caught.

These are planning estimates, not tax advice and not your exact withholding. W-4 elections, benefits, pre-tax deductions, and local income taxes all move the real number. The calculators model a standard case and say so on every page rather than implying more precision than the inputs allow.

The Sources section at the foot of every page links the document each figure came from, so a number can be read back against the original rather than taken on trust. Reader-reported problems have already been fixed on the site, and corrections are welcome.

• IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32, the 2026 federal brackets and standard deduction
• SSA, the 2026 Social Security wage base
• Each state's own department of revenue, cited and linked on that state's page
• How the numbers are verified, the checking process in full