About PayRaiseCalc
I built this because my first real raise went 42% to taxes and I didn't understand why until I did the math three paychecks later.
I was 24, living in Oakland, making $64,000 at my second job out of college. My manager gave me a 7.5% bump, $4,800 on paper, which I had already mentally allocated to rent, a new laptop, and a vacation to Mexico that fall. The first post-raise paycheck hit and I had $141 more than the last one. Across 26 bi-weekly periods that's $3,666 a year, not $4,800. I'd budgeted against a number that didn't exist.
The 42% that disappeared went to three places. Federal marginal at 22%. California state at 9.3% (the bracket I'd crossed into). FICA at 7.65%. Stack those against a raise dollar that sat right at the federal bracket edge and you get close to 40% evaporation. My napkin had used the federal effective rate, not the marginal rate, and had forgotten state tax entirely.
That napkin is why PayRaiseCalc exists. Every other raise calculator I tested when I started this project in early 2026 either ignored tax or forced you to compute two paychecks and subtract by hand. Neither answers the one question you actually have, which is will this raise feel like a raise when the new direct deposit lands.
How the calculator was built
The tax tables are not scraped, they're hand-coded from primary sources. IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 for the 2026 federal brackets and standard deduction (the first year the One Big Beautiful Bill inflation adjustments apply). SSA 2026 wage base for Social Security. Tax Foundation 2026 tables cross-referenced against individual state Department of Revenue publications for the full-bracket states (CA, NY, NJ, HI, OR, MN, DC).
Flat-rate approximations are used for the mid-tier states. We flag that in the methodology. Where a state has a graduated schedule that's nearly flat, we use the rate that applies at the $50k to $200k income band, which covers the majority of users. That means we're off by $50 to $300 a year at the extremes for those states. Accurate enough to make a decision with, not accurate enough to replace your CPA.
The CPI anchor is updated manually every month from the BLS CPI-U release, with a visible "as of" stamp on the results card. If the stamp is more than six weeks out of date, file an issue on the contact page.
Why I turned down a 10% "raise" in 2023
A Bay Area company offered me a role with a 10% bump on base, plus relocation from my then-home in Austin. I ran the numbers the careful way this time. New rent was $1,800/month higher. California state tax added about $9,500/year vs Texas zero. The 10% nominal was $14,000 on my old $140k base. $21,600 in rent delta. $9,500 in CA state tax. Net: $2,100 worse a year, before factoring in any of the cost-of-living on groceries, gas, and everything else that runs 20% higher in SF.
I took the Austin counter-offer instead. 6% base, remote, same role. Real take-home was $13k higher than the 10% move would have been. That spreadsheet lives on my laptop as sf-vs-austin-2023.xlsx and it's the single best piece of personal finance math I've ever done.
The point isn't that California is bad. It's that "10% raise" without geography, state tax, and cost-of-living context is a meaningless number. The calculator here won't price your rent, but it will show you the state tax delta, which is usually the biggest lever nobody calculates.
Who this is for
Anyone evaluating a raise offer, a promotion, a job change, or an annual comp cycle. If you're comparing two offers in different states, this is the right tool. If you're trying to figure out whether a 3% COLA is actually a COLA in a 3.3% inflation year, this is the right tool. If you're a 1099 contractor comparing to a W-2 offer, see the hourly to salary math post.
If you're a high-net-worth earner with RSU vesting acceleration, AMT, K-1 income, or backdoor Roth questions, you need a CPA, not a calculator. The IRS keeps a tax pro directory.
What's next
On the roadmap: pre-tax 401(k) modeling, HSA integration, multi-state for people who split time, local/city tax (NYC, Philly, San Francisco), and bonus withholding. Got a feature request? Drop a note.
About the ads (there aren't any yet)
This site is ad-free for now. If I add any it'll be a single unobtrusive placement below the calculator, and I'll never run an advisor-match lead-gen widget because those are predatory in the finance space. The hosting runs about $18/month; I'd rather eat that than sell your raise data to a lead broker.
If you want to support the site, share a link. That's more valuable than any donation.
Read the disclaimer before you take anything here as tax or financial advice. It isn't. It's math from public sources.