How to Read Your Paycheck Stub, Line by Line
Updated July 2026 · 6 min · 2026 IRS figures (Rev. Proc. 2025-32)
Most people look at exactly one number on their paycheck stub: the deposit. But the stub is the only document that shows, every two weeks, whether your employer is withholding the right taxes, sending your 401(k) money where it belongs, and charging you what you agreed to for health insurance. Payroll systems make mistakes more often than people assume — and a wrong stub compounds silently until filing season, when the fix is a painful surprise instead of a two-minute email to HR.
We'll walk a concrete example: a $75,000 salary paid biweekly is a gross of about $2,885 per check, 26 times a year. From that starting number, every line on the stub either subtracts a tax, subtracts a benefit you chose, or reports a running total. Here is what each one means and what it should roughly say.
Gross pay and the tax lines
Gross pay is everything you earned this period before anything is touched: base salary or hours × rate, plus overtime, bonuses and commissions. Directly under it come the taxes. Federal income tax withholding is the biggest and the only one that is an estimate — your employer calculates it from your W-4 (filing status, dependents, extra withholding), aiming to prepay roughly what you'll owe in April. On our $2,885 biweekly check for a single filer it runs around $295, but it varies legitimately from person to person with the same salary.
FICA appears as two separate lines, and they are not estimates — they are exact percentages of gross. Social Security (sometimes labeled OASDI or SS) takes 6.2%: about $179 on our example check, applied until you've earned $178,000 in the year. Medicare takes 1.45% with no cap: about $42. Then comes state income tax withholding, which depends entirely on where you work — zero in Texas or Florida, a real deduction in California or New York. If you see a state you don't work in, stop and read the red-flags section below.
Pre-tax vs. post-tax deductions — the order matters
Pre-tax deductions come out before income tax is calculated, so every dollar there lowers your tax bill. Traditional 401(k) contributions reduce your federal and state taxable income — a 6% contribution ($173 per check in our example) saves a 22%-bracket worker about $38 of tax per check. Health, dental and vision premiums plus HSA and FSA contributions run through a Section 125 "cafeteria plan" and go further: they escape FICA too. One honest detail most stubs never explain: 401(k) money still pays FICA — only the cafeteria-plan items skip all of it.
Post-tax deductions come out after taxes and don't reduce anything: Roth 401(k) contributions (taxed now, tax-free later), life insurance beyond employer-paid basics, union dues, charitable payroll giving, and wage garnishments if a court ordered them. What's left after taxes and all deductions is net pay — the deposit. On our $75,000 example with 6% to a 401(k) and typical single-coverage health premiums, the biweekly deposit lands somewhere near $2,100, roughly 73% of gross.
The YTD columns are your audit trail
Next to every line, the stub shows a year-to-date (YTD) total: everything earned, withheld and deducted since January 1. This column is not decoration — it's how you catch errors while they're still small. YTD gross tells you if a bonus or retro pay was actually processed. YTD 401(k) tells you whether you're pacing toward the annual contribution limit or will fall short of the full employer match. YTD federal withholding, compared against what a calculator says you'll owe for the year, tells you in July whether April will bring a refund or a bill.
Two YTD checks worth doing once a quarter: multiply YTD gross by 6.2% and compare it to YTD Social Security (they should match to the dollar until you cross $178,000), and multiply by 1.45% for Medicare. If either is off, payroll is miscalculating a flat percentage — the easiest error there is to prove and the easiest to get refunded through your employer while the tax year is still open.
Three red flags that cost real money
Red flag one: withholding for the wrong state. If you moved — say from New York to Florida — and payroll never updated your work state, they keep sending your money to a state that may no longer have a claim on it. You'll have to file a nonresident return to claw it back, months later and interest-free. Red flag two: Social Security still being deducted after your YTD gross passes $178,000. The 6.2% must stop at the wage base; on income above it, every extra deduction is simply your money, recoverable but only if you notice.
Red flag three: federal withholding of $0 when you didn't ask for it. "Exempt" status on a W-4 is only legal if you owed nothing last year and expect to owe nothing this year — rare for anyone with a full-time salary. If a payroll clerk marks it by mistake, your checks look pleasantly bigger all year, and then April delivers the entire year's tax as one bill, possibly with an underpayment penalty. A $75,000 single earner would owe roughly $7,670 all at once. Thirty seconds per stub is cheap insurance against all three.
FAQ
Why is my federal withholding different from a coworker with the same salary?
What does YTD mean and why should I care?
Why did my paycheck suddenly get bigger near the end of the year?
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Figures in this guide use the 2026 federal parameters published by the IRS (Rev. Proc. 2025-32): standard deduction, brackets, FICA and the Child Tax Credit — the same engine behind our calculator. Educational information, not tax advice; consult a CPA about your situation. hello@mypaycal.org
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