What actually reaches your account after federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Maine’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.
Maine guide
Maine's top bracket is 7.15%, and it begins at $63,450 of taxable income for a single filer. That is the number in the rate table.
It is not the highest marginal rate a Maine earner faces. Between $100,000 and $175,000 of Maine adjusted gross income, the standard deduction is withdrawn ratably — so each additional $1,000 earned is taxed at 7.15% and removes $200 of shelter that was also being taxed at 7.15%. The effective marginal rate in that band is close to 8.6%.
On $85,000, below that band, a single filer pays $4,128 and takes home $64,499.
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; Maine's brackets, deduction and exemption phase-outs and retirement rules come from this site's own sourced 50-state dataset, citing 36 M.R.S. and Maine Revenue Services' Form 1040ME instructions and rate schedules. Every dollar figure is computed by the same engine the site's calculators use, on a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependents or pre-tax deferrals unless stated. Property tax is discussed qualitatively.
Across incomes, single filer:
Look at the jump from $120,000 to $175,000. The salary rises 46% and the tax rises 68%, from $6,917 to $11,636. That is the deduction disappearing across exactly that range, and it is section 3.
Maine's $571 at $30,000 is genuinely low — lower than Illinois's $1,340 or Massachusetts's $1,280 — because $20,150 of shelter is a large share of a small salary. Maine is progressive in a way that flat-rate states are not.
Married-joint thresholds are exactly double at every step, which is the ordinary arrangement and worth noting because Maine's phase-out thresholds are not proportional at all.
Read the full Maine guide →15 min read · Updated 2026-09-01