About

What it does

TakeHome answers one question: what is actually left after taxes. Enter your gross pay, pick a filing status and a work state, and it returns take-home pay per paycheck and per year, a line-by-line breakdown of every withholding, and a side-by-side comparison of up to three states.

All fifty states and the District of Columbia are covered, each with its own standard deduction, personal exemption and brackets for tax year2026. TakeHome is an independent tool — it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the IRS or any state tax agency.

How it works

The calculation runs in your browser. Your pay, filing status and deductions are never sent to a server: there is no account, no database and no storage of your figures. Reload the page and they are gone.

The full arithmetic is written out in the Method section of the calculator — four steps, in the order the IRS and the states apply them.

Where the numbers come from

• Federal brackets and standard deduction — IRSRevenue Procedure 2025-32, which sets the tax year 2026 figures. The2027 schedule has not been published yet; its status and the current projections are on the 2027 federal bracket page.
• Social Security and Medicare — the 2026 contribution base published by the Social Security Administration.
• State rates and brackets — Tax Foundation’s 2026state income tax tables, effective January 1, 2026.

Those three sources are linked directly from the Method section, and every figure in the calculator is transcribed from them rather than estimated.

Editorial guidelines & audit

Every number this calculator produces is derived mechanically from three primary sources — no estimates, no rounding shortcuts, no numbers written by hand. The audit trail is:

1. Federal layer — IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32(bracket thresholds, standard deductions, and FICA base for TY 2026). These values are transcribed once into lib/federal.ts and locked by golden tests in tests/show-math.test.ts.
2. State layer — Tax Foundation, State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets, 2026 (effective January 1, 2026). Seven states with mid-year 2026legislative amendments (AR, AZ, GA, ME, SC, UT, WV) are patched via script; the ledger of sources and modelling decisions lives in docs/tax-data-exceptions-2026.md and is locked by tests/tax-law-2026.test.ts.
3. Cross-check — At default settings ($120,000 salary, single, California), the engine produces federal $15,563.60, CA state $6,235.26, and take-home $79,901/year. These exact figures are pinned in tests/show-math.test.ts and re-verified on every commit by the CI test suite.

When a state legislature amends its tax schedule mid-year, we update the engine within one business cycle, add a new entry to the exceptions ledger, and commit both the patch and a new regression test in the same pull request. The commit history on GitHub is the public audit log.

Found a figure that looks wrong? Report a calculation discrepancy — include the state, filing status, gross pay, the number you believe is wrong, and the source you compared it with. We check the transcription against the primary source and correct it when it differs.

What it leaves out

This is a withholding estimate, not a filing calculation. It does not model refundable credits such as the child tax credit or the EITC, dependent exemptions and credits, bonuses and equity compensation, itemized deductions, additions for age or blindness, AMT, phase-outs, income-specific exemptions such as tips and overtime, capital gains, the Form W-4 settings that change how an employer withholds, retirement withdrawals, or the state disability and paid-leave premiums that come out of a paycheck in thirteen states.

Local and municipal income taxes — New York City, Philadelphia, and many Ohio and Maryland localities — are not applied on their own; you can enter a local rate manually. Head-of-household filers inherit the single-filer brackets at the state level.

The complete list lives in the Method section under Not modelled and Not deducted.

Who it is for

Employees who work remotely, or who are weighing a move and want the tax difference between two states before committing. It is also useful when reading a job offer, a relocation package, or a change in filing status.

It is not built for freelancers estimating quarterly payments, business returns, or anyone preparing to file.

Who built it

TakeHome was built by an independent developer interested in making US tax withholding transparent and verifiable for remote workers. The motivation was personal: understanding why two states can both tax the same paycheck, and why a move from California to Texas is worth more than it appears on paper.

The calculator is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the IRS, any state revenue agency, or any financial institution. It is an independent tool built on publicly available government data.

The source data — IRS Revenue Procedure, Social Security Administration wage base, and Tax Foundation state tables — are linked directly in the Methodology section so you can verify every number. The calculation logic itself is audited by an automated test suite that pins expected outputs for a canonical example; if any bracket or rate changes, the test fails until the expectation is updated deliberately.

Found a figure that looks wrong? The discrepancy report form explains what to include. Reports are checked against the primary source; if a transcription error is found, it is corrected in the same commit as the regression test that prevents it from recurring.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a figure that looks wrong: induk1@hotmail.com.

The Contact page explains what to include in a report, and the Disclaimer sets out what this tool is not.