What actually reaches your account after federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Iowa’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.
Iowa guide
Iowa charges a flat 3.8% and takes $2,578 from an $85,000 salary. A single filer takes home $66,049.
Then, if your school district levies one, you pay a surtax — and Iowa's is structured unlike any other local income tax in the country. It is charged as a percentage of the state tax you owe, not as a percentage of your income.
That single design choice is why Iowa's local layer gets missed. Every other state's local tax can be estimated by applying a rate to your salary. Iowa's cannot, and applying a district's percentage to your income instead of to your tax overstates it by a factor of more than thirty.
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; Iowa's rate and surtax structure come from this site's own sourced 50-state dataset, which cites Form IA 1040. Every dollar figure computed by the site's engine is on a single filer taking the state's standard deduction, with no dependents or pre-tax deferrals unless stated. District-by-district surtax percentages are not recorded in this site's dataset and are never included in any total — see section 3.
Iowa's income tax is a flat 3.8%, applied after a standard deduction that matches the federal figure at $16,100 for a single filer.
That combination is unusual and it is generous. Most states with a low flat rate pair it with a small deduction — Pennsylvania allows nothing, Indiana $1,000, Kentucky $3,360. Iowa allows the full federal amount.
Iowa taxes exactly the same base the federal system does, which makes the arithmetic unusually easy to follow: 3.8% of your federal taxable income is very close to your Iowa tax.
Read the full Iowa guide →16 min read · Updated 2026-09-01