How a 2026 federal paycheck is estimated
This page does two jobs that people ask of a paycheck calculator, and it keeps them apart. The first is arithmetic. An hourly rate times hours per week times weeks is a year's gross pay. Fifty-two weeks and forty hours are the blanks on the form, not a rule in the Internal Revenue Code. Change either number if the job is not full time. The second job is federal tax on that gross wage: income tax, Social Security, and Medicare. State income tax, city tax, and state disability insurance are not deducted. If a state tax cannot be tied to an official table on this page, it is left out rather than guessed.
Federal income tax for 2026 comes from Revenue Procedure 2025-32, which the IRS described in news release IR-2025-103 on 9 October 2025. The standard deduction is $16,100 for a single person or for married filing separately, $32,200 for married filing jointly or a surviving spouse, and $24,150 for a head of household. Those amounts already include the changes the IRS attributed to the One, Big, Beautiful Bill. The page subtracts the deduction that matches the filing status you pick. It does not add the extra standard deduction for age or blindness, and it does not itemize. If your itemized deductions would be higher, the tax here is too high.
The tax itself uses the seven rates that the revenue procedure keeps in force: 10, 12, 22, 24, 32, 35 and 37 percent. Each row of the official table is a base tax plus a percentage of the excess over a threshold, applied to taxable income, which is gross pay after the standard deduction. For a single person the 10 percent row ends at $12,400 of taxable income. The next row is $1,240 plus 12 percent of the excess over $12,400, up to $50,400. The 22 percent row is $5,800 plus 22 percent of the excess over $50,400. A single person's taxable income of $60,000 is therefore $7,912. The 37 percent row for a single person starts above $640,600 of taxable income, at a base of $192,979.25. Joint, head of household, and married filing separately each have their own table in section 4.01. The page switches table when you switch status. It does not average two statuses.
Employee Social Security and Medicare are separate from that income tax, and they are not reduced by the standard deduction. IRS Topic 751 states the employee Social Security rate at 6.2 percent and the wage base for 2026 at $184,500. Wages above that base are not subject to Social Security tax. A salary of $250,000 therefore draws Social Security of 6.2 percent of $184,500, which is $11,439, not 6.2 percent of the whole salary. Employee Medicare is 1.45 percent of all wages, with no wage base. Topic 751 also says the employer withholds the 0.9 percent Additional Medicare Tax once wages paid to the employee in the year pass $200,000, and that this withholding ignores filing status. On $250,000 the additional withholding is 0.9 percent of $50,000, which is $450. There is no employer match on that 0.9 percent.
The filing-status thresholds for Additional Medicare Tax on the tax return are different from the withholding trigger. Topic 560 sets them at $250,000 for married filing jointly, $125,000 for married filing separately, and $200,000 for other taxpayers. A joint return can owe less Additional Medicare Tax than the employer withheld, or a married person filing separately can owe more. This paycheck page follows the withholding rule of $200,000 so the line looks like a paystub. It is not Form 8959. Pre-tax deductions that reduce Social Security wages, such as a traditional 401(k), are not subtracted. Type the wage that is actually subject to FICA if you already know it.
What this is not is Publication 15-T. Employers withhold income tax from each paycheck using the Form W-4, the pay period, and the percentage method or the wage-bracket method. Two people with the same annual salary can have different withholding because one claimed a dependent, one asked for extra withholding, or one is paid weekly and the other monthly. This page annualises first and then applies the rate table to the year. Divide the yearly tax by the number of paychecks only if you want a rough period amount, and expect the real stub to differ. The net line is gross pay minus federal income tax minus employee Social Security, Medicare, and additional Medicare withholding.
A salary typed in directly uses the same tax path as an hourly rate. The hourly equivalent is then the salary divided by hours times weeks, so you can see what the salary implies. Going the other way, $25 an hour for 40 hours and 52 weeks is $52,000. For a single filer the standard deduction leaves taxable income of $35,900, the income tax is $4,060, Social Security is $3,224, and Medicare is $754. Nothing is due for additional Medicare. The amount after those federal taxes is $43,962. That worked example is the test. It is still not a promise of the number on a Friday stub, because the stub has the W-4 and the benefits in it.