What actually reaches your account after federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Missouri’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.
Missouri guide
Missouri has eight income tax brackets, which sounds like an elaborately graduated system. The top bracket begins at $9,436 of taxable income.
Every one of the eight rate changes happens below $9,500. Above that figure, Missouri is a flat 4.7% tax wearing the costume of a graduated one.
On $85,000 a single filer pays $3,058 and takes home $65,570. And unlike most of its neighbours, Missouri's local income tax question has a very short answer: two cities, Kansas City and St. Louis City, each at 1%.
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; Missouri's brackets and its earnings tax structure come from this site's own sourced 50-state dataset. 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. The Kansas City and St. Louis earnings taxes are named here but never included in any total — see section 4.
Missouri's structure is unusual in a way that is easy to misread from a bracket count alone.
The entire graduated structure operates within an $8,088 band, from the 2% bracket at $1,348 to the top rate at $9,436. Once your taxable income passes $9,436, you are at the top rate and stay there — whether you earn $30,000 or $3 million.
Missouri has no higher bracket for high earners. The 4.7% that applies to a $40,000 salary is the same 4.7% that applies to a $2 million one. In practice Missouri is a flat-tax state with a small graduated ramp at the very bottom.
Missouri matches the federal standard deduction at $16,100 for a single filer. That is unusual — most states allow far less, and several allow nothing.
Read the full Missouri guide →16 min read · Updated 2026-09-01