How to make a pay stub here
The first visit opens a sample stub for a fictional bakery paying one hourly baker every two weeks, so you can see a finished result before you type anything. Select Start blank to clear it. Then work down the editor in the order the stub prints:
- Employer: legal name, an optional trading name (DBA), address, phone and EIN. The EIN prints as XX-XXX1234 unless you switch on the full number. A logo is optional.
- Employee: name, address, employee ID and, if you want it on the stub, the last four digits of the Social Security number. The tool has no field for the full number and never stores one.
- Pay period: frequency (weekly, every two weeks, twice a month or monthly), period start and end, pay date, and a check number or the last four digits of the account for direct deposit.
- Earnings: regular and overtime hours at an hourly rate kept to six decimal places, a salary for the period, bonus, commission, tips, holiday, paid time off, sick pay, retro pay, a non-taxable reimbursement, or anything else.
- Federal withholding: the details from the employee’s Form W-4. The tool shows every line of the IRS worksheet it used, so you can check it.
- Deductions and state: pre-tax and after-tax deductions, the work state and any local tax.
- Review: the net pay, the warnings panel and, if you want, the tax figures from your payroll provider in place of the computed ones. Then download the PDF, print it, or copy the stub to the next pay period with Next stub.
On a phone, an Edit and Preview switch sits at the top and the net pay and a download button stay fixed at the bottom of the screen.
Intended use
This tool is for recording wages that were actually paid: by an employer or a household employer producing wage statements, by a business owner paying themselves W-2 wages from their own company, by a bookkeeper preparing statements for a client, and by an employee rebuilding records from a real payroll, for example after an employer stopped providing stubs.
A pay stub is only worth what the payroll behind it is worth. Making one that shows pay that was never paid, to rent a home, get a loan or claim a benefit, is fraud. Knowingly giving a false statement to influence a federally insured lender is a federal crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a $1,000,000 fine under 18 U.S.C. § 1014 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1014). Landlords and lenders do not take a stub at face value: they compare it with bank deposits, call the employer and ask for IRS tax transcripts. Before your first download, the tool asks you to confirm that the stub records wages that were actually paid. It asks once per browser.
What a pay stub must show
No federal law requires employers to hand out pay stubs. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires records instead: the Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet #21 says the Act “requires no particular form for the records”, but they must identify the employee and show hours worked and wages earned (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/21-flsa-recordkeeping). The detail is in 29 CFR Part 516.
Most states go further and require a written or electronic statement with each payday. California’s Labor Code section 226, for example, lists items such as gross wages, total hours for hourly staff, deductions, net wages, the pay period dates, the employee’s name and the last four digits of the Social Security number or an employee ID, and the employer’s legal name and address. A handful of states have no general statement law at all. The stub this tool prints covers the items that appear in most state laws:
- Employer’s legal name and address, and the employee’s name with an ID or the last four digits of the Social Security number.
- The pay period’s start and end dates and the pay date.
- Each kind of earnings with its rate and hours for hourly work, for this period and year to date.
- Gross pay, each tax withheld, each deduction, and net pay, for this period and year to date.
- Optionally, leave balances, which some states require for paid sick leave.
For the rules in your state, with the statute for each one, read pay stub requirements by state.
How federal withholding is calculated on this stub
Federal income tax withholding follows Worksheet 1A of IRS Publication 15-T (2026), the percentage method for automated payroll systems (https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15t). It turns the period’s taxable wages into a yearly figure, looks the yearly figure up in an annual rate schedule, and divides the answer back down to one pay period. The six 2026 schedules (standard and Step 2 checkbox, for each of the three filing statuses) are stored exactly as the IRS prints them, and a test re-derives every row from the 2026 tax brackets in Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and checks the result against every row of the IRS biweekly wage bracket table.
Here is the sample stub worked through. The baker earns $22.50 an hour: 80 regular hours make $1,800.00 and 4 overtime hours at 1.5 times make $135.00, so gross pay is $1,935.00. A 5% 401(k) deferral ($96.75) and an $85.00 health premium under a Section 125 plan are both pre-tax, so federal taxable wages are $1,935.00 − $96.75 − $85.00 = $1,753.25. The employee filed a 2026 Form W-4 as single and left Steps 2 to 4 blank.
- Annualise: $1,753.25 × 26 pay periods = $45,584.50.
- Subtract the line 1g amount, $8,600 for single filers ($12,900 for married filing jointly, and nothing when the Step 2 box is checked): $36,984.50. This is the Adjusted Annual Wage Amount.
- Find the row in the single STANDARD schedule: at least $19,900 but less than $57,900, with $1,240.00 plus 12% of the amount over $19,900.
- Tentative annual amount: $1,240.00 + 12% × $17,084.50 = $3,290.14.
- Divide by 26: $126.54. With no Step 3 credits and no Step 4(c) extra, that is the federal income tax withheld.
Social Security is 6.2% of $1,850.00, which is $114.70, and Medicare is 1.45%, which is $26.83. Their base is higher than the income tax base because a 401(k) deferral is still subject to Social Security and Medicare, while the Section 125 premium is not (IRS Topic 751, https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751). Social Security stops for the year once wages reach the 2026 wage base of $184,500 (https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html); the tool reads the year-to-date figure and taxes only the part of a stub below the base. The 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax starts once this employer has paid more than $200,000 in the year, whatever the employee’s filing status.
Pennsylvania adds $56.80 (3.07% of $1,850.00: Pennsylvania taxes the 401(k) deferral), leaving net pay of $1,428.38.
This is not the same as the take-home paycheck calculator, which estimates a year’s income tax from the annual brackets and divides it by the number of paychecks. That is a fair guide to what a salary is worth, but a payroll system does not withhold that way, and the two can differ by a few dollars a paycheck. The pay stub generator follows the withholding worksheet, so it should match what payroll software withholds. The optional rounding to whole dollars that Publication 15-T allows is not used: the divisions are carried at full precision and the amount is rounded to the cent once, at the end.
Pre-tax and after-tax deductions, and which taxes they reduce
A pay stub has up to four different taxable wage figures, and getting them right is where most home-made stubs go wrong. Each deduction type in the tool carries the bases it reduces, shown as labels under the line:
- Traditional 401(k), 403(b) and 457 deferrals lower the wages for federal income tax but not for Social Security or Medicare. Form W-2 box 1 leaves them out; boxes 3 and 5 include them.
- Health, dental and vision premiums, HSA contributions and FSA contributions through a Section 125 cafeteria plan lower federal income tax wages and Social Security and Medicare wages.
- Commuter benefits lower all three, up to the 2026 monthly limit of $340 (Rev. Proc. 2025-32).
- Roth 401(k), garnishments, child support, union dues, loan repayments and charity come out after tax and lower nothing.
- Other pre-tax lets you tick the bases yourself.
State income tax follows the federal treatment unless the state says otherwise. Pennsylvania is the main exception in the states the tool computes: its employer guide says elective 401(k) deferrals “are taxable to employees and should be included in Pennsylvania gross wages”.
The tool warns, without blocking, when year-to-date deferrals pass the 2026 limits: $24,500 for a 401(k), plus an $8,000 catch-up from age 50 or $11,250 for ages 60 to 63 (IRS Notice 2025-67, https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-25-67.pdf), and $4,400 self-only or $8,750 family for an HSA (Rev. Proc. 2025-19, https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-25-19.pdf). To see the same four bases laid out in a spreadsheet, read the Excel payroll gross-to-net guide.
State and local taxes
State income tax is computed only where the tool implements that state’s own employer formula, read from the state’s withholding guide and tested against the guide’s printed example where it has one: Pennsylvania (REV-415, 3.07% flat), Arizona (the percentage the employee elects on Form A-4, 2.0% if none is filed), Illinois (IL-700-T), Indiana, including the county tax (Departmental Notice #1), Kentucky (the 2026 withholding formula), North Carolina (NC-30, which withholds at 4.09% and rounds to whole dollars), Colorado (DR 1098), Michigan (Form 446) and Utah (Publication 14, for pay periods starting on or after June 1, 2026). Hover over the note in the state panel to see which guide was used.
Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming have no state income tax on wages, so the line does not appear. Every other state is entered by hand as a percentage or an amount, with a link to that state’s withholding page. Headline flat rates are not the formula: most states subtract allowances or a standard deduction first, and a guessed figure would be wrong on a real stub. The tool never shows a state tax of zero without telling you.
Employee-paid state programs can be switched on, each from the agency’s own 2026 figures: California SDI 1.3% with no cap; New Jersey unemployment 0.3825% and workforce 0.0425% on the first $44,800, TDI 0.19% and family leave 0.23% on the first $171,100; New York paid family leave 0.432% up to $411.91 a year and disability 0.5% up to $0.60 a week; Washington paid leave (the employee’s 71.43% share of 1.13%) and WA Cares 0.58%; Hawaii TDI up to $7.50 a week; Oregon Paid Leave 0.6%; and Connecticut Paid Leave 0.5%. The caps read the year-to-date figures. City, county and school-district taxes such as a local wage tax are added as manual lines; the tool keeps no local rate database.
Year-to-date totals and the caps that depend on them
Every stub is saved in this browser under its employee. The year-to-date column is built from all of that employee’s stubs with a pay date earlier in the same calendar year, in pay-date order, so the order you typed them in does not matter. The tax year is chosen by the pay date, as it is in payroll, so a period that ends on December 28 and is paid on January 3 counts in the new year.
If the employee was paid somewhere else earlier in the year, enter those totals under Year to date from earlier payroll. They are added to every year-to-date column and read by the caps: the Social Security wage base, the $200,000 Additional Medicare threshold, the 401(k) limit and the state program caps. Edit an earlier stub and the tool tells you how many later stubs read its totals; they are recomputed in order the next time they are shown. A pay date in a year the tool has no tables for switches the tax lines to amounts you enter, with a warning.
Bonuses, commissions and other supplemental wages
Publication 15, section 7 (https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15) lets an employer withhold on a bonus, commission or back pay in two ways. By default the tool uses the aggregate method: the bonus is added to the period’s regular wages and the total goes through the worksheet. The alternative is the optional flat rate of 22%, which the publication allows when supplemental wages are paid separately or identified separately and income tax was withheld from the employee’s regular wages this year or last year. Whichever you choose, supplemental wages above $1,000,000 in the calendar year are withheld at 37% “without regard to the employee’s Form W-4”, and the tool reads the year-to-date supplemental wages to apply that.
Reported cash tips are wages for income tax, Social Security and Medicare. Because the employee already has the cash, the stub shows them in earnings and then takes them back out before net pay, so they are not paid twice; switch that off for card tips paid through payroll. The 2026 deductions for qualified tips and overtime do not change the tables. Publication 15-T says employers must use the employee’s updated Form W-4, so the effect comes through the W-4 amounts you enter.
Pay frequencies and pay dates
Weekly pay has 52 periods a year, every two weeks has 26, twice a month has 24 and monthly has 12, and the withholding tables use that number to annualise. Biweekly and semimonthly are easy to mix up: a biweekly period is always 14 days and 80 hours for a full-time employee, while a semimonthly period runs from the 1st to the 15th and the 16th to the end of the month, so it holds 10 to 12 working days and an hourly employee’s hours change from one period to the next.
The pay date is when the money reaches the employee, and it is usually a few days after the period ends. The tool warns if the pay date comes before the period ends or if two stubs for the same employee overlap. Next stub copies the latest stub, keeps the same gap between period end and pay date, advances the period and the check number, and drops one-off lines such as a bonus. Many states set how often wages must be paid; the state-by-state guide points to them. To turn a timesheet into the hours for a stub, the time card calculator totals a week of clock-in and clock-out times.
Business owners, contractors and the self-employed
An S corporation owner who works in the business is an employee of the corporation, is paid W-2 wages through payroll, and gets a pay stub like anyone else. An owner of a sole proprietorship, or of an LLC taxed as one, is not paid wages: money taken out of the business is a draw, with no withholding and no stub. Partners take guaranteed payments and distributions, not wages.
Independent contractors are paid against an invoice, not through payroll, so they do not get pay stubs; no tax is withheld and they receive a Form 1099-NEC instead of a W-2. If you pay a contractor, the right documents are an invoice from them and a receipt for the payment. If you are self-employed and need to show your income to a lender or landlord, the usual evidence is your tax return with Schedule C, your 1099 forms, IRS tax transcripts and business bank statements. A pay stub you make for yourself as a sole proprietor would not be a record of wages, because no wages were paid.
Templates, printing and check stock
Classic is a traditional statement with ruled blocks and a line at the foot. Modern puts the employer on an accent-coloured band. Compact is dense enough to print two stubs on one sheet: for a single stub you get an employee copy and an employer copy with a cut line between them, and in a batch two different stubs share each sheet. All three print on US Letter or A4, with amounts in tabular figures so the columns line up.
The PDF has real, selectable text and embedded fonts, a title and author set from the employee and employer, and a file name like PayStub-Jordan-Ellis-2026-10-01.pdf. Print uses the same PDF. The stub carries no branding from this site and does not imitate the layout of any payroll company. Identifiers are masked: the Social Security number prints as XXX-XX-1234, the EIN as XX-XXX1234 unless you choose to print it in full, and a bank account as ••••1234.
Your data
Everything you enter stays in this browser’s local storage, under one entry for this tool. There is no account, no server copy and no analytics event that carries a figure from a stub; the PDF is built on your device. The flip side is that clearing your browser data deletes the stubs, and so does a private window when it closes.
Open Employees and stubs to see every stub by employee, open or duplicate one, or delete it with an undo. Select several to download them as one PDF, or export a CSV payroll register with one row per stub, a column for each tax and deduction, net pay and year-to-date gross. Backup and import saves everything to a JSON file you can load on another device, and Delete all my data clears the lot. The IRS asks employers to keep employment tax records for at least four years (Publication 15), and the FLSA requires payroll records for three years, so keep the backups.
General information, not tax, payroll or legal advice. Withholding tables, wage bases and state formulas are for the tax year shown on the stub and were checked against the IRS, the Social Security Administration and each state’s published guide on September 26, 2026. Check the figures with your payroll provider or accountant before you rely on them, and follow your state’s rules for what a wage statement must include.