Paycheck and take-home pay calculators, 8 countries
One rule on every page here: each deduction sits on its own base. Federal income tax is progressive, FICA is flat but capped, state tax depends on where you live, and city tax is a separate layer rather than a rounding error. Most paycheck tools subtract a 401(k) contribution before payroll tax and quietly get the number wrong; these do not. All figures use 2026 tables and are rebuilt from the published schedules, not copied from another calculator.
Every country runs different deductions on different bases — a UK payslip has no FICA, a German one has five social branches, a Taiwanese one has a supplementary premium on the year-end bonus. Each market gets its own engine rather than a translated template.
The mechanics differ more than the rates do. In the United States, Social Security stops at the wage base while Medicare keeps going, and a pre-tax 401(k) contribution lowers income tax without touching FICA. In the United Kingdom, National Insurance is charged on gross pay under a net-pay pension arrangement, so pension and NI almost never move together. Canada splits the pension plan into a first tier with an earnings ceiling and a second tier above it, each with its own rate. Germany charges five separate social branches, each with a different contribution ceiling. Taiwan levies a supplementary health premium only on the part of a bonus above four times the insured salary.
That is why a single translated template cannot cover them: the same gross salary produces answers that differ by more than the tax rates would suggest, and the line items a reader expects on the page are different in each language.
