What actually reaches your account after federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Pennsylvania’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.
Pennsylvania guide
Pennsylvania has the simplest income tax arithmetic in the United States. Take your salary. Multiply by 3.07%. That is your state income tax.
There is no standard deduction to subtract first. There is no personal exemption. There are no brackets to walk. On $85,000 the state takes $2,610 — which is 3.07% of $85,000, to the cent.
Then your municipality and your school district take about 1% more, and if you work in Philadelphia the city takes 3.735% — larger than the state tax itself.
That second half is the part almost no calculator shows you, and in Philadelphia it more than doubles your income tax burden.
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; Pennsylvania's rate and its local tax structure come from this site's own sourced 50-state dataset. 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 pre-tax deferrals unless stated. Local Earned Income Tax and the Philadelphia Wage Tax are named here but never included in any total, because rates are set municipality by municipality — see section 4.
Pennsylvania's personal income tax is 3.07%, applied to essentially all compensation.
What makes it unusual is not the flatness — twelve states charge a single rate. It is that Pennsylvania pairs the flat rate with no standard deduction and no personal exemption. Most flat-tax states allow something: Illinois has a personal exemption, Colorado follows the federal deduction, Michigan gives $5,900 per exemption. Pennsylvania subtracts nothing.
The consequence is that Pennsylvania's tax is a genuine percentage of your gross compensation rather than of some reduced figure:
Read the full Pennsylvania guide →16 min read · Updated 2026-09-01