Estimate your paycheck after taxes, build a monthly budget, and see how much house you can afford — all in one place.
Federal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare on your gross pay.
Estimates use 2026 federal brackets, the 2026 standard deduction, and FICA rates (6.2% Social Security up to the $184,500 wage base, 1.45% Medicare, plus 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax above $200,000). Retirement contributions reduce income tax but not Social Security and Medicare; health and FSA contributions reduce both. State income tax is a simplified 2026 estimate using each state's standard deduction and rates; local taxes, credits, and exemptions aren't included.
Allocate your monthly take-home across expenses, savings, and everything left over.
See how much house you can afford and what the monthly payment looks like.
Affordability caps total monthly housing plus debts at your chosen ratio. This uses your net take-home income carried from the paycheck tab, so the estimate is more conservative than a lender's, since lenders typically apply DTI to gross income. The interest rate is pre-filled with the latest Freddie Mac national average — adjust it to a quote you've received. Choosing an adjustable rate lets you set the initial rate and an estimated adjusted rate after the fixed period.
The number on your offer letter and the number that reaches your bank account are rarely the same, and the gap surprises almost everyone the first time they see it. Four things sit between gross pay and take-home pay: federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and whatever comes out before taxes are calculated at all.
The United States uses graduated brackets. If you land in the 22% bracket, that does not mean 22% of your income goes to federal tax. It means the last dollars you earned are taxed at 22%, while the dollars below those thresholds are taxed at 10% and 12%. Your effective rate — total tax divided by total income — is always lower than your bracket. This is why a raise never costs you money overall, despite the persistent myth that it can.
The standard deduction comes off before any of this happens. For most filers who do not itemize, a meaningful slice of income is taxed at 0% before the first bracket even applies.
These are flat, and they are separate from income tax. Social Security is withheld at 6.2% of wages up to an annual wage base that rises most years; above that ceiling, it stops. Medicare is 1.45% with no ceiling at all, plus an additional 0.9% on wages above a threshold that depends on filing status. Your employer pays a matching share you never see on the stub.
Money routed into a traditional 401(k), an HSA, an FSA, or most employer health premiums comes out of gross pay before income tax is calculated. A $200 pre-tax contribution does not reduce your take-home pay by $200 — it reduces it by $200 minus the tax you would have paid on that money. For someone in the 22% bracket, the real cost of that contribution is closer to $156.
Note that 401(k) contributions reduce income tax but not FICA. HSA contributions made through payroll reduce both, which is what makes them unusually efficient.
Withholding is an estimate your employer makes on your behalf. Filing status, dependents, and any extra withholding you requested all feed into it. If you get a large refund every spring, you have been lending money to the government at 0% for a year. If you owe every spring, your W-4 is under-withholding. Neither changes what you owe — only when you pay it.
The most common budgeting mistake is planning around gross salary. Rent, groceries and car payments are paid out of take-home pay, so that is the number a budget has to start from — which is exactly why the paycheck calculator comes first here.
A widely used starting split of take-home pay:
These are guidelines, not rules. In an expensive housing market, needs routinely run past 50%, and the honest response is to shrink the wants line rather than pretend the housing cost is something else. The value of the framework is not the exact ratios — it is that it forces every dollar to be assigned somewhere.
Irregular expenses. Insurance premiums, car registration, holidays, and annual subscriptions do not show up monthly, so they never make it into a monthly budget, and then they arrive all at once. Total them for a year, divide by twelve, and treat that figure as a monthly line item you set aside rather than spend.
With one exception — high-interest credit card debt, where the interest rate makes payoff the better mathematical return — a starter cushion of one month of expenses generally comes first. Without it, the next unexpected repair goes back onto the card you were trying to clear, and the cycle restarts.
Underwriting looks at ratios. Your life looks at what is left over each month. Those two numbers can be very far apart, and the gap is where people get into trouble.
The traditional rule of thumb: housing costs stay under 28% of gross monthly income, and total debt payments — housing plus car loans, student loans and credit card minimums — stay under 36%. Many loan programs allow higher back-end ratios, sometimes well past 43%. Being allowed to and being comfortable are different questions.
A monthly housing cost is four things:
Quotes that mention only principal and interest can understate the real monthly cost by hundreds of dollars.
Every percentage point of mortgage rate changes buying power by roughly ten percent. The same monthly payment buys a meaningfully smaller house at 7% than at 5%. This is why affordability shifts even when list prices do not, and why running the numbers at today's rate matters more than running them at the rate a friend got two years ago.
Closing costs typically run 2–5% of the purchase price. Maintenance is commonly estimated at 1–2% of home value per year — invisible until the roof or the water heater makes it visible. Neither appears in a mortgage calculator, and both are real.
The paycheck calculator applies the current federal income tax brackets and standard deduction, Social Security at 6.2% up to the annual wage base, and Medicare at 1.45%, after subtracting any pre-tax deductions you enter. State tax is applied as a flat estimated rate by state, which is an approximation: several states use their own graduated brackets, and a few have no income tax at all.
The mortgage calculator uses the standard amortization formula and adds estimated property tax, insurance and PMI to produce a monthly figure.
What these tools do not model: local and city income taxes, itemized deductions, tax credits beyond the child tax credit, self-employment tax, multiple jobs, bonuses withheld at supplemental rates, garnishments, or anything specific to your employer's payroll setup.
Treat every result as a planning estimate. For a filing decision, a home purchase, or anything with real money attached, confirm the numbers with a tax professional or your lender. Rate and tax figures shown on this page are dated in the footer so you can see how current they are.