2026 California hourly paycheck calculator

At 40 hours a week, $20 an hour is $41,600 a year before tax. Filing single with no pre-tax deductions, roughly $34,354 of that is take-home pay in California — about $1,321 in each biweekly paycheck. Your own figure moves with your W-4, your benefits and the hours you actually work.

No. Withholding is worked out from what you are paid in the period, not from how the job describes the pay. An hourly worker and a salaried worker who take home the same gross in the same period have the same federal tax, the same FICA and the same state withholding. The difference is that hourly pay varies week to week, so the withheld amount varies with it.

Yes — one tool, several names, and CA is just the postal abbreviation for California. Enter your rate and the hours you are paid for and it works as a CA wage calculator; enter the gross figure from a stub you already have and it works as a CA pay stub calculator, because the lines it returns are the lines your employer prints: gross, federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare and state income tax.

At 40 hours a week it is the rate times 2,080 — the "a year, before tax" column in the table above. Take-home is the column beside it, once federal tax, FICA and California withholding have come out. If you are paid a fixed salary rather than by the hour, the California paycheck calculator asks the same question from the other end.

At the same rates as everything else on the cheque. Overtime is ordinary wages — it lands in the same pay period and runs through the same withholding tables, so no part of it is taxed at a penalty rate. A heavy week feels over-taxed because the percentage method annualises whatever the period paid: one busy week is withheld as though every week were that busy, and the difference is settled on your return. Enter your overtime hours in the calculator above and pick the multiplier your employer pays.

Time and a half is your rate times 1.5 for every hour past 40 in a week — the federal floor under the Fair Labor Standards Act. At $20 an hour that is $30 an overtime hour, so a 46-hour week pays $800 of straight time plus $180 of overtime. Some employers pay double time for holidays or a seventh consecutive day, so the calculator takes 1×, 1.5× or 2×. Tips and bonuses are separate: a bonus is often withheld at a flat supplemental rate rather than through the normal tables, which is why it lands smaller than people expect.

Withholding is calculated fresh each payroll run, so a heavy week is withheld as though every week were that heavy, and a light week the other way. Over a year it roughly averages out, and the difference is settled on your tax return. Enter a typical week to see a typical paycheck.

Bi-weekly is every two weeks — 26 paychecks a year, always the same weekday, and for a 40-hour week always 80 hours on the stub. Semi-monthly is twice a month, usually the 15th and the last day: 24 paychecks, a weekday that moves, and an hour count that drifts between roughly 80 and 92. For hourly work the bi-weekly cheque is the easier one to check, because 80 times your rate is the whole of gross.

FICA is the pair of federal payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare — 7.65% of gross wages together, 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare. It is a flat rate rather than a bracket, so it comes off the first hour you work as well as the last, and your employer pays the same again on top. Social Security stops once you have been paid $184,500 in a year; Medicare has no cap, and wages above $200,000 carry an extra 0.9%. Enter your pay so far this year in the calculator above and both are applied.

A pre-tax deduction comes out of gross pay before tax is worked out, so it lowers the amount you are taxed on — traditional 401(k), most health insurance premiums, HSA and FSA. A post-tax deduction comes out after tax and saves you nothing in tax at all — Roth 401(k), union dues, a garnishment, most life cover. Both have their own field under "pre-tax deductions and W-4 details" above, kept apart because they look identical on a pay stub and are not the same money.

Texas, Florida, Nevada, Tennessee, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, New Hampshire, Washington do not tax wage income. That does not always mean federal tax is the only thing withheld: a few of those states collect employee-paid premiums for programmes such as paid family leave or temporary disability, and where that applies this calculator includes it.

Head of household is for someone unmarried who pays more than half the cost of keeping a home for a qualifying dependant. It is not a bigger standard deduction — Publication 15-T gives single and head of household the same $8,600 in the withholding worksheet — the brackets are simply wider, so more of your pay is taxed at a lower rate. On $20 an hour in California it is worth about $1,694 a year of take-home pay. Claiming it when you do not qualify means too little is withheld and a bill at filing time.

Because Form W-4 stopped using allowances in 2020. The redesigned form asks for dependants as dollar amounts in Step 3, and for other income and deductions in Step 4, and the IRS rebuilt the withholding tables around it. A calculator that still asks how many federal allowances you claim is working from a form that was retired. If you have not filed a new W-4 since 2019, your employer is still withholding on your old allowances and no calculator will match your stub until you file one.

No, and the difference is in the withholding rather than the tax. Overtime goes through the ordinary tables with the rest of your hours. A bonus paid separately is normally withheld at the flat supplemental rate — 22% federal, rising to 37% above $1,000,000 of supplemental pay in a year — which is why a bonus lands smaller than an overtime cheque of the same size. What you finally owe on either is the same; the bonus tax calculator does the supplemental method.

Withholding is money your employer sends to a tax authority on your behalf — federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, state income tax. A deduction is anything else taken off the cheque: insurance, retirement, union dues. Both shrink your pay, but only withholding is a prepayment of tax, and only withholding is settled up when you file.

Almost never. Unemployment insurance is funded by an employer payroll tax in nearly every state and does not appear as a deduction on your stub at all. What some hourly workers do see instead is an employee-paid premium for a related state programme — paid family and medical leave, temporary disability, long-term care — and this calculator includes any that California charges.