About SalaryLabs
US salary calculators and pay guides built for workers who need clear paycheck answers without signup friction, personal-data capture, or recruiter-style noise.
Our Mission
SalaryLabs exists because paycheck math is still harder than it should be. Workers use salary numbers to judge offers, plan bills, and negotiate compensation, but the tools are often slow, vague, or built for someone else. We build free calculators that get to the point.
In practice, that means SalaryLabs is built as a worker-first publisher: salary calculators, pay guides, and trust pages that help someone understand what a number means in the US labor and tax system before making a real decision.
What We Build
SalaryLabs provides 13 free pay calculators covering the most common salary questions US workers face:
- Salary Calculator — Convert annual salary to hourly, weekly, monthly rates
- Salary Comparison — See how your salary stacks up against global market rates
- Hourly to Salary — Project annual earnings from any hourly wage
- Salary to Hourly — Find your effective hourly rate accounting for real hours worked
- Overtime Calculator — Calculate 1.5× and 2× overtime pay
- Take Home Pay Calculator — Estimate net pay after federal and state taxes
- Tax Estimator — Federal and state income tax breakdown
- Income Breakdown — Visualize where your income goes
- Income Percentile — See where you rank among all US workers using BLS data
- Burnout Calculator — Estimate how unpaid overtime changes your effective hourly pay
- Negotiation Script — Get a personalized salary negotiation script in 60 seconds
- Salary Time Machine — Adjust any salary for inflation from 1970–2026
- US Salary Heatmap — See real purchasing power of your salary across all 50 states
We also publish in-depth guides on salary vs hourly pay, how overtime works under the FLSA, US vs Europe salary comparisons, and more.
Our Data Sources
All calculations and salary benchmarks on SalaryLabs are sourced from official US government data:
- IRS Tax Brackets & Standard Deductions — Updated annually from IRS Publication 15-T and Rev. Proc. 2025-32
- Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) for salary benchmarks
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — Overtime rules and exempt/non-exempt classifications
- Social Security Administration — FICA wage base limits updated annually
- State Tax Authorities — State income tax rates sourced from individual state revenue departments
📅 Data currency: All tax rates, salary benchmarks, and FICA limits on SalaryLabs reflect 2026 figures. We review and update all data at the start of each calendar year.
Our Methodology
All calculations follow publicly documented formulas:
- Hourly rate: Annual salary ÷ (hours per week × weeks per year). Default assumes 2,080 hours (40 hrs × 52 wks).
- Federal income tax: Applied using 2026 IRS tax brackets with standard deductions per filing status.
- FICA taxes: Social Security at 6.2% on wages up to $184,500 (2026 limit); Medicare at 1.45% on all wages.
- Overtime: Federal minimum of 1.5× the regular rate for hours over 40/week per FLSA Section 7.
Use the output as a decision aid, not as a filed tax result or legal conclusion. If the stakes are high, verify it with a qualified professional.
Privacy First
Every calculation on SalaryLabs runs entirely in your browser. We do not collect, store, or transmit any financial data you enter. No account required, no cookies tracking your inputs, no data sold to third parties. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
Who We Serve
SalaryLabs is built for US workers across all industries and income levels — from hourly restaurant workers evaluating a raise, to software engineers comparing job offers, to recent immigrants understanding their first American paycheck. We also offer a full Spanish-language version to serve the 40+ million Spanish-speaking workers in the US.
Who SalaryLabs is not built for first: recruiter lead-gen, employer branding, or payroll software sales. The product starts from worker questions: "What hits my paycheck?", "Is this offer actually better?", and "How do I explain the gap clearly?"
⚠️ Disclaimer: SalaryLabs does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice. Our calculators are designed to give you a fast, transparent estimate based on the assumptions shown on each page.
What This Project Is
SalaryLabs is a free utility website that offers salary, tax, and pay calculators along with a small set of explainer guides. The math runs in your browser, the data anchors are public (IRS, BLS, SSA, DOL, state revenue departments), and the calculation logic is documented on the Methodology page.
This site is run as an independent project. It is not affiliated with any employer, recruiter, payroll provider, or government agency. It does not collect, store, or transmit financial data you enter into the calculators.
How This Project Is Maintained
- Calculator formulas reference IRS Publication 15-T, IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 (2026 figures), SSA wage-base announcements, and BLS OEWS releases.
- Tax brackets and FICA limits are reviewed annually when the IRS and SSA publish updated figures.
- BLS wage benchmarks are refreshed when OEWS publishes a new release. Wage data inherently lags the live market by 12–18 months.
- Calculation logic is documented on /methodology. Changes to formulas are reflected in the page's
dateModifiedfield.
AI Disclosure
This project uses AI-assisted tools to help draft and edit explanatory copy. All numerical outputs are produced by deterministic JavaScript formulas, not AI inference. Public data figures (tax brackets, FICA limits, BLS benchmarks) are taken from the primary sources listed above and refreshed manually.
About the Author
SalaryLabs is researched and maintained by Wahyu Agustiar, an independent researcher of US compensation data based in Indonesia. The project started in early 2024 as a small calculator and grew into a bilingual library of deterministic salary, paycheck, and tax tools, plus a small set of long-form guides that show the underlying math against IRS, BLS, SSA, and DOL primary sources.
The author's public professional profile is available on LinkedIn. Reader feedback on calculations or sourcing goes to [email protected] and is reviewed individually.
This is not a multi-author publisher. There is no editorial board, no anonymous "research team", and no claim of professional licensure. The site is a research utility, and the byline reflects that.
For full disclosure of how this project is monetized, see our Business Model & Monetization Disclosure.
Contact
Found a calculation error or want to suggest a new tool? Reach us at [email protected]. Include the page URL, inputs, and result when reporting a calculation issue.
💡 Found a bug? Email us with the inputs you used and the result you received. We verify all reported issues and update our formulas when needed.
Start Here
If you are trying to decide whether SalaryLabs is trustworthy, start with the Methodology page for formulas, the Editorial Policy for sourcing standards, and the Corrections Policy for how we handle mistakes. If you want to challenge a result, use the Contact page and send the exact inputs you used.