What actually reaches your account after federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Alaska’s own brackets — with every line shown separately, so you can check it against a real payslip.
One paycheck line by line, and the pay period in which Social Security stops and every remaining cheque gets bigger.
What a raise leaves you after tax, and what a bonus is withheld at versus what it actually costs.
The bracket ladder drawn out — every bracket, the income that landed in it, and why a raise can never leave you with less.
What actually comes out of an American paycheck in 2026 — federal brackets, FICA, and all fifty states' own rules — plus the take-home spread on one identical salary, computed rather than asserted.
A bonus arrives with a third missing and everyone concludes bonuses are taxed punitively. They are not. Withholding and tax are different things, and the difference comes back to you.
Convert every offer to take-home before you answer, match offers across state lines, and counter with scripts that work — with the arithmetic computed rather than asserted.
Self-employment tax is 14.13% of profit, not 15.3%. Price your rate, reserve on receipt, hit the safe harbour, and know when an S-corp is worth it — computed, not asserted.
Alaska guide
Alaska is the only state that levies neither an individual income tax nor a statewide sales tax. It is also the only state where about a hundred municipalities levy a sales tax of their own — which means "Alaska has no sales tax" is true of the state and false of a great many Alaskans.
The Department of Revenue's own Personal Income Tax program page states it directly: the state does not have an individual income tax, and therefore no employee withholding for state income tax is required.
A single filer earning $85,000 in Alaska takes home $68,628.
A note before you start. This is general education, not tax advice. Federal figures are tax year 2026, from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and the Social Security Administration; Alaska's position comes from this site's own sourced 50-state dataset, which cites the Alaska Department of Revenue Tax Division directly. Every dollar figure is computed by the same engine the site's calculators use, on a single filer taking the federal standard deduction with no dependents or pre-tax deferrals unless stated. Local sales tax and cost of living are discussed qualitatively — both vary enormously by community.
Across incomes:
No state return, no withholding line, no bracket table to go stale.
The single-filer figures above are the ones most often quoted. Here is the same salary as a married couple's sole income, filing jointly:
All of that difference is federal. In a state with graduated brackets, part of the joint-filing benefit comes from the state widening its own brackets for married couples — Oregon and Minnesota both do. In Alaska there is no state layer to widen, so the entire gap is the federal standard deduction doubling and the federal brackets widening.
That has one consequence worth naming: the joint-filing benefit is the same dollar amount in Alaska as in every other no-income-tax state, and smaller than in most taxing states. If you are comparing a move on the strength of filing jointly, the comparison is federal-versus-federal plus whatever the other state adds.
Read the full Alaska guide →16 min read · Updated 2026-09-01