About PayBrackets

PayBrackets answers one deceptively hard question: "how much of my pay do I actually keep?" Between seven federal brackets, FICA caps, 51 different state systems, and rules that change every January, most people genuinely don't know, and most answers online are a year stale.

We rebuilt the math from primary sources: the IRS revenue procedure that sets each year's brackets, the SSA wage-base announcement, and state revenue department tables compiled by the Tax Foundation. Every calculator runs that engine live in your browser, and every page documents its assumptions in our methodology.

The site is built and maintained by Prasen, a software engineer who builds calculation-heavy web tools. The 2026 dataset (every bracket, deduction, and credit for all 51 jurisdictions) is encoded and spot-checked by hand against official tables, then verified by automated tests on every release.

PayBrackets is free, requires no signup, and never sees your data; calculations run entirely on your device. The site is supported by advertising, which never influences the math.

Questions, corrections, or a state quirk we should model? Get in touch.