Net Pay Calculator
Start from your gross pay for a single pay period and see your real take-home amount — including pre-tax 401(k) and health insurance deductions.
Why pre-tax deductions matter
Contributions to a traditional 401(k), HSA, or pre-tax health insurance premium are subtracted from your gross pay before federal and state income tax is calculated. This lowers your taxable income — and therefore your tax bill — even though the money still comes out of your paycheck. (Note: pre-tax deductions don't reduce Social Security or Medicare wages in most cases; this calculator applies them to federal and state income tax only, which is the most common setup.)
Frequently asked questions
Traditional vs. Roth 401(k): why it matters here
This calculator's pre-tax deduction field assumes a traditional 401(k), where contributions are subtracted from your taxable income before federal and state tax is calculated — lowering your tax bill today in exchange for paying tax on withdrawals in retirement. A Roth 401(k) works the opposite way: contributions come out of your paycheck after tax, so they don't reduce your taxable income now, but qualified withdrawals in retirement are tax-free. If your contributions are Roth rather than traditional, leave the pre-tax fields at zero and your net pay estimate will be more accurate, since Roth contributions don't lower this period's tax withholding.
Other common pre-tax deductions not modeled here
Beyond 401(k) and health insurance, many employees also have pre-tax deductions for dental and vision insurance, a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), a Health Savings Account (HSA), or commuter benefits. Any of these reduce your taxable income similarly to the fields already in this calculator. If you have several pre-tax benefits, you can approximate their combined effect by adding their per-period dollar amounts together into the "Health insurance / period" field, since both are treated the same way in the underlying calculation.
More frequently asked questions
A quick sanity check for your result
As a rough rule of thumb, most W-2 employees in no-tax states see net pay around 75–82% of gross pay, while those in higher-tax states with meaningful pre-tax deductions often land closer to 68–75%. If your result falls far outside that range, double-check your inputs — a misplaced decimal in the 401(k) percentage field is a common source of unexpectedly large swings in the estimate.