How to Read Your Pay Stub: A Line by Line Guide

Your pay stub is the only document that shows exactly how your employer got from what you earn on paper to what lands in your bank account. Most people check the net pay figure and ignore the rest. That is understandable, because the abbreviations look like a different language, but it is also expensive. Payroll errors are common, they compound quietly across a year, and by the time they surface on a W-2 the fix involves amended forms instead of a two minute conversation with HR.

This guide walks through every zone of a standard US pay stub, decodes the tax and deduction codes you are likely to see, explains the difference between the lines that actually cost you money and the ones that only look like they do, and finishes with a check you can run on any pay period in about five minutes.

Does your employer even have to give you a pay stub?

There is no federal law requiring employers to hand employees a pay stub. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep accurate payroll records, but it does not require them to share those records with you each pay period. Everything beyond that is set by state law, and the variation is wide.

Broadly, states fall into three groups. Most states are access states, meaning your employer must make wage statement information available to you, though electronic access through a payroll portal usually satisfies the rule. A smaller group goes further and requires that you be able to obtain a printed statement, either automatically or on request. And a short list of states, commonly cited as Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Dakota, and Tennessee, has no pay stub requirement at all. Even there, nearly every employer provides one, because payroll software generates it by default and because the stub is the employer’s own best defense in a wage dispute.

California has the most detailed requirements in the country, specifying total hours worked, all applicable pay rates, and itemized deductions. New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Illinois also mandate specific fields. If your stub is missing something and you are in a state that requires it, your state labor department is the place to raise it.

The five zones of a pay stub

Layouts differ between ADP, Paychex, Gusto, Workday, and every in house system, but almost all of them organize the same five zones. Once you can spot the zones, any stub becomes readable.

1. Identification header: your name, employee ID, the employer’s name, the pay period start and end dates, the pay date, and often your filing status and allowances as recorded from your W-4.
2. Earnings: everything you were paid for this period, usually broken out by type.
3. Taxes withheld: mandatory federal, state, and local withholding.
4. Deductions: everything else that comes out, split into pre-tax and post-tax.
5. Summary and year to date: gross pay, total taxes, total deductions, net pay, and a parallel column showing the running annual totals.

The pay period dates in zone one matter more than people expect. The period you worked and the date you are paid are often two or three weeks apart, which is why a raise that took effect on the first of the month may not show up until the following check, and why the last check of December can be taxed as January income.

Zone 2: reading the earnings section

Earnings are broken into categories because each category can be taxed or calculated differently. Common lines include:

• Regular: base hours at your standard rate, or the salaried equivalent for the period.
• Overtime: typically hours beyond 40 in a workweek at 1.5 times your regular rate. Note that the regular rate for overtime purposes is not always your base hourly rate. Shift differentials and nondiscretionary bonuses generally have to be folded into it, which is one of the most common sources of underpayment.
• Double time, holiday, shift differential: premium rates set by your employer or by state law.
• PTO, vacation, sick: paid time off, usually taxed identically to regular wages.
• Bonus, commission, retro: supplemental wages. These are often withheld at a flat federal supplemental rate rather than through your normal W-4 calculation, which is why a bonus check can look far more heavily taxed than it really is. We cover that in detail in why your bonus paycheck looks overtaxed.
• Tips: reported tips appear as earnings and are subject to Social Security and Medicare tax even though the cash may already be in your pocket.
• Imputed income: the value of a non-cash benefit that is taxable to you. The classic example is employer-paid group term life insurance above $50,000 of coverage, plus things like personal use of a company vehicle or health coverage for a domestic partner. Imputed income is added to your taxable wages, taxed, and then backed out again, so it raises your tax without raising your net pay.
• Reimbursements: expense repayments under an accountable plan. These are not wages, are not taxed, and should not be inflating your gross.

If you earn tips or overtime, note that recent federal deductions for both change your annual tax bill without changing how these lines are withheld each period. See what tipped workers actually need to know and why “no tax on overtime” does not mean your whole overtime check is tax free.

Zone 3: decoding the tax abbreviations

This is where most stubs become unreadable, because payroll systems abbreviate aggressively and inconsistently. Here is what you are almost certainly looking at.

What you might see	What it is	How it is set
FED, FIT, FITW, Fed W/H	Federal income tax withholding	IRS withholding tables applied to your W-4
OASDI, SS, FICA-SS, Soc Sec	Social Security tax, 6.2 percent of wages up to the annual wage base, which is $184,500 for 2026	Fixed by federal law
MED, FICA-HI, Medicare	Medicare tax, 1.45 percent on all wages with no cap, plus an additional 0.9 percent on wages above $200,000 for single filers	Fixed by federal law
SIT, ST, State W/H	State income tax withholding	Your state’s rules and your state withholding certificate
SDI, CASDI, VPDI, TDI, DBL	State disability insurance premium	State program. California withholds 1.3 percent of all wages in 2026 with no cap
PFL, FLI, PFML	Paid family and medical leave premium	State program. New York withholds 0.432 percent in 2026, capped at $411.91 for the year
LIT, Local, City, SD Tax	Local, county, or school district income tax	Municipality or school district
SUI, UI (employee share)	Employee unemployment contribution, which only a few states impose on workers	State program

Two of these are worth pausing on. Social Security stops entirely once your year to date wages cross the wage base, which is why high earners see their net pay jump partway through the year with no raise involved. Medicare never stops. The current figures for both are on our Social Security and Medicare limits page.

The state line is the one worth checking hardest. If you moved, started working remotely, or your employer is headquartered elsewhere, the state on your stub may simply be wrong, and it can be wrong for months before anyone notices. Our guide to the remote work tax trap covers what to do. You can also compare rates on our state income tax rates page, or check whether you are in one of the states with no income tax, in which case that line should be absent entirely.

Zone 4: pre-tax versus post-tax deductions

This is the single most valuable distinction on the whole document. A pre-tax deduction comes out of your pay before tax is calculated, so it lowers your taxable wages. A post-tax deduction comes out after, so it costs you the full amount.

Common pre-tax deductions

• Traditional 401(k), 403(b), or governmental 457 contributions
• Health, dental, and vision premiums taken through a Section 125 cafeteria plan
• Health savings account contributions made through payroll
• Health care and dependent care flexible spending account contributions
• Qualified commuter and parking benefits

Here is the nuance almost nobody explains: pre-tax does not mean the same thing for every deduction. Section 125 premiums, payroll HSA contributions, and FSA contributions reduce your wages for federal income tax, Social Security tax, and Medicare tax. Traditional 401(k) contributions reduce your wages for federal income tax only. Social Security and Medicare are still charged on every dollar you defer into a 401(k).

You can see this directly on your stub. If your Social Security taxable wages are higher than your federal taxable wages, a retirement deferral is usually the reason. This is also why routing money through an HSA can be more tax efficient per dollar than a 401(k) deferral, a comparison we work through in FSA versus HSA and HSA 2026.

State treatment adds another layer. A few states tax retirement deferrals that the federal government does not, with Pennsylvania the best known example, so a Pennsylvania stub will show 401(k) contributions reducing federal taxable wages while state taxable wages stay untouched.

Common post-tax deductions

• Roth 401(k) contributions
• Wage garnishments and child support orders
• Union dues, in most cases
• Repayment of a 401(k) loan
• Charitable giving through payroll
• Some voluntary life and disability premiums

That last one is a deliberate trade rather than an oversight. If your long term disability premium is paid with post-tax dollars, any benefit you eventually receive arrives tax free. If your employer pays the premium or you pay it pre-tax, the benefit is taxable at exactly the moment you can least afford it. Check which arrangement you have.

The traditional versus Roth choice sits in this same zone and produces two identical looking retirement lines with very different paycheck effects. We break that down in traditional versus Roth 401(k), and the annual contribution ceiling is covered in the 2026 401(k) limit guide.

The lines that are not actually coming out of your pay

Many stubs include an employer contribution or memo section, and it routinely alarms people who read it as money they lost. It is not. These are amounts your employer paid on top of your wages, shown for transparency:

• Employer 401(k) match
• Employer share of your health premium, which is often larger than your own share
• Employer HSA contribution
• The employer half of Social Security and Medicare, matching yours dollar for dollar
• Employer paid life and disability coverage

The test is simple. If a line appears in a section that does not feed the net pay subtraction, it is information, not a deduction. Add it up once a year anyway, because it is a fair measure of what your job pays beyond salary.

Why the year to date column matters more than the current column

The current period column tells you about one paycheck. The year to date column tells you whether your whole year is on track. Four things are worth watching there:

• Year to date Social Security wages against the annual wage base, so you know when that 6.2 percent will stop.
• Year to date retirement contributions against the annual limit. Front loading too aggressively can cause you to hit the cap early and forfeit employer match on later paychecks, unless your plan has a true up provision.
• Year to date federal withholding against what you actually expect to owe. This is the number that predicts an April surprise. If it is drifting, the fix is filing a new W-4, and the W-4 problem explains why nobody will do it for you.
• Year to date gross against your salary divided by pay periods elapsed. A drift here means something changed that you did not authorize.

Your final stub of the year is also your best W-2 preview. Box 1 will not match your year to date gross, and it is not supposed to: pre-tax deductions come out of it first. Boxes 3 and 5 will be different again for the reasons described above. If you understand why the three numbers differ, you can verify your W-2 in about a minute.

A five minute check you can run on any pay stub

1. Multiply your hours by your rate for each earnings line and confirm the total matches gross pay. Salaried workers should divide annual salary by the number of pay periods.
2. Subtract your pre-tax deductions from gross. The result should be close to the federal taxable wages figure shown on the stub.
3. Multiply Social Security taxable wages by 6.2 percent. It should match the OASDI line almost exactly, unless you have crossed the wage base.
4. Multiply Medicare wages by 1.45 percent and compare to the Medicare line. This one should always match.
5. Confirm the state on the stub is the state you actually worked in.
6. Take gross, subtract every tax and every deduction, and confirm you get net pay.

The Social Security and Medicare steps are the most useful, because those are flat percentages with no judgment involved. If either is off by more than rounding, something is genuinely wrong and worth raising immediately. Federal income tax withholding is the one line you cannot easily verify by hand, because it depends on your W-4 entries and the IRS withholding method your employer uses. To sanity check that figure against what your full year should look like, run your numbers through our United States salary calculator.

The errors that show up most often

• Wrong state withholding after a move or a switch to remote work, sometimes running for many months.
• Overtime calculated on base rate only, ignoring shift differentials or production bonuses that legally belong in the regular rate.
• A benefit election that never took effect, or one taken twice. Three paycheck months are a frequent culprit, because many employers only take benefit deductions on the first two checks.
• A raise applied from the wrong effective date, which is worth catching in the first period rather than the fourth.
• Retirement deferral percentages applied to the wrong wage base, for instance excluding bonus pay when your election says otherwise.
• Withholding that quietly stopped because a W-4 was reset during a payroll system migration.

None of these are exotic. All of them are far easier to correct in the pay period they occur than at tax time. If your paycheck changed and you cannot find the reason, why your 2026 paycheck may look different even without a raise works through the usual suspects.

Frequently asked questions