About SalarySolve
SalarySolve is a free suite of US salary and paycheck calculators built on official 2026 tax data. It exists because the answer to "how much will I actually take home?" shouldn't require creating an account, sitting through popups, or trusting unlabeled math.
Three principles guide the site:
- Primary sources only. Federal figures come from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, FICA from the SSA, and state rates from state revenue departments — documented in full on our methodology page.
- Client-side by design. Every calculation runs in your browser. Salary data is never uploaded, logged, or stored. There is no analytics script reading your inputs, and no account to create.
- Estimates labeled as estimates. Where we simplify — such as effective-rate approximations for progressive-bracket states in the current phase — the result says so, visibly, in the interface rather than in fine print.
How the calculators are built
One tax engine powers everything on the site. The same code that runs in your browser when you use a calculator also generates every static figure you see on our state and salary pages, which means the numbers in our tables cannot drift away from the numbers in the tool. An automated check runs on every build and compares thousands of scenarios across states, filing statuses, salary levels, and pre-tax contributions; if any figure diverges by even a cent, the build fails and the site does not ship.
Every page is static HTML generated ahead of time. There is no database, no server-side processing of your data, and no third-party fonts or trackers loaded from other domains. This is what makes the privacy claim above verifiable rather than promotional — you can open the page source and confirm it.
What we cover, and what we don't
Federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare including the additional Medicare surtax, and state income tax for all 50 states and the District of Columbia are modeled. For the nine states with no wage income tax and the sixteen with a flat rate, our figures use each state's exact 2026 structure. For progressive-bracket states, the current release uses a clearly-flagged effective-rate estimate while exact bracket tables are added state by state.
We do not model local or municipal income taxes, state disability and paid-leave premiums, employer benefit deductions, or the effect of your specific Form W-4 entries. Where these matter materially in a given state, the relevant page says so. Our figures are a close planning estimate, not a payroll guarantee, and nothing on this site is tax, legal, or financial advice.
Corrections
Tax rules change, sometimes mid-year, and states adjust rates on their own schedules. If you find a figure that looks wrong, we want to know — get in touch and tell us the page and the number. Corrections to published rates are treated as bugs and fixed at the source, so the calculator and every page derived from it update together.
SalarySolve is part of the Solve family of tools, alongside TheWordSolve. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with the IRS or any government agency.