Tax withholding calculator: federal W-4 withholding estimator

How much federal tax should be withheld from my paycheck?

There is no single percentage, because withholding is built from your annual pay rate, your filing status and whatever you entered on your W-4. What you can do is check your number against the baseline: a single filer, taking the standard deduction, who filed a W-4 with steps 2, 3 and 4 left blank. That is the most common situation, and it is the case your employer's payroll software assumes when nothing else is entered.

Two things in that table catch people out. The first is how low the income tax percentage is compared to the bracket they think they are in. Someone earning $80,000 is a 22% taxpayer in the sense that their next dollar is taxed at 22%, but only $13,500 of their income reaches that band, so the whole year averages 11.0%. The 2026 tax brackets page has the full bands if you want to walk the arithmetic yourself.

The second is FICA. Social Security takes 6.2% of wages up to the $184,500 wage base for 2026 and Medicare takes 1.45% with no cap, for a combined 7.65% that has nothing to do with your W-4. You cannot adjust it, and an extra 0.9% Medicare surcharge starts once wages pass $200,000. When someone says a quarter of their check disappears, roughly a third of that is FICA, not income tax.

How do I fill out a W-4 to withhold the right amount?

The W-4 has five steps and most people only need two of them. Steps 1 and 5 are your name, filing status and signature. The three in the middle are the adjustment levers, and each one moves your withholding in a specific direction.

Step 4(c) is the one worth knowing. It is a plain dollar figure added to every paycheck, so it turns a vague worry into arithmetic you can check. If you are $1,200 short with ten biweekly checks left in the year, you put $120 in Step 4(c) and the problem is solved. No estimated payment, no voucher, no penalty.

You can file a new W-4 with your employer any time, as many times as you want. There is no annual window and no limit. Payroll usually applies it within one or two cycles. Our step-by-step walkthrough of how to fill out a W-4 covers the multiple-jobs worksheet in more detail.

How many allowances should I claim?

None, because allowances no longer exist. The IRS removed them when it redesigned Form W-4 for 2020, and there has been no allowances box on the form for six years. The old advice to claim 0 for a bigger refund or 1 to keep more of your paycheck refers to a form that has been retired.

Allowances were tied to the personal exemption, and the personal exemption was set to zero by the 2017 tax law. With nothing left to allocate, the IRS replaced the count with the dollar-amount steps in the table above. The modern equivalents are direct:

That last row matters more than it looks. Exempt status is not permanent. It expires and has to be claimed again by February 15 each year, and you only qualify if you owed no federal tax last year and expect to owe none this year. People who claim it out of habit while actually owing tax build a bill with a penalty attached to it.

Why is no federal tax being withheld from my paycheck?

Seeing $0.00 in the federal income tax line of your pay stub is alarming but often correct. Here are the real causes, in the order we see them, and how to tell which one applies to you.

The last row explains most of the confusing cases. Payroll systems calculate withholding as though every check you receive is typical for the whole year. A short week annualizes to a salary below the standard deduction, so the software correctly withholds nothing on that check, then withholds normally on a full one. Across a year of steady hours it evens out. Across a year of wildly uneven hours it does not, and you end up short.

If you are on a 1099 there is no withholding to fix, because there is no employer taking anything out. That income is settled through quarterly estimated payments instead, and the quarterly tax calculator works out the four amounts.

Why do two-earner households under-withhold so often?

This is the single most common reason an otherwise careful filer owes money in April, and the arithmetic is worth seeing once because it is larger than people expect.

Take a married couple, each earning $60,000, filing jointly for 2026. Each files a W-4 with Step 2 left blank. Each employer runs payroll as though the married filing jointly standard deduction of $32,200 and the wide joint brackets apply to that job alone. So each employer sees $60,000, subtracts $32,200, reaches $27,800 of taxable income, and withholds about $2,840 for the year. Two employers, $5,680 withheld in total.

The actual tax on $120,000 of joint wages is different. Subtract one standard deduction of $32,200, not two, and taxable income is $87,800. Run that through the joint brackets and the tax is about $10,040. The household is roughly $4,360 short, and nobody made an error on a form.

The fix is Step 2. If both jobs pay roughly the same, checking the box at Step 2(c) on both W-4s tells each employer to use the higher withholding table, which closes most of the gap. If the two salaries are far apart, the Step 2(b) worksheet gives a more precise figure. A second job, a spouse returning to work mid-year, or a side income stream all create the same shape of problem.

How much tax is withheld from a bonus?

A flat 22%, if your employer pays the bonus separately from your regular wages and identifies it as supplemental pay. That rate is set by IRS Publication 15 and applies regardless of your actual bracket. Once supplemental wages paid to you during the calendar year pass $1 million, the mandatory rate on the excess jumps to 37%.

This is why a bonus feels overtaxed to some people and undertaxed to others. Withholding at 22% is not the tax on the bonus. It is a placeholder that gets reconciled on your return like every other dollar withheld.

If your employer instead lumps the bonus into a regular paycheck and runs the whole amount through the normal tables, withholding can look enormous on that one check. That is the annualization effect again: payroll briefly treats a $14,000 check as though you earn $364,000 a year. It corrects itself. How bonuses are taxed covers both methods in full.

What happens if I under-withhold?

You pay the difference when you file, and if the shortfall is large enough you also pay an underpayment penalty. The penalty is not automatic, though, and the safe harbors are generous enough that most people can stay clear of it deliberately.

Meet any one of them and there is no penalty, even if you write a large check in April. The prior-year harbors are the useful ones, because you already know last year's number: it is on your filed return, so you can target it exactly instead of forecasting a year you have not finished. Your adjusted gross income from the 2025 return is what decides whether the threshold is 100% or 110%.

Withholding has one advantage over estimated payments that is easy to miss. The IRS treats tax withheld from wages as paid evenly across the year no matter when it was actually taken. So a large Step 4(c) amount in November counts as though it had been spread over all twelve months, which can retroactively cure an underpayment that quarterly vouchers could not. That is the single best reason to fix a shortfall through your W-4 rather than by mailing a payment.

Should I aim for a refund or to break even?

Break even, in strict financial terms. A refund is your own money returned without interest after the IRS has held it for up to sixteen months, and the same dollars in a savings account would have earned something. The average federal refund runs into the low thousands, which is a meaningful amount to have lent out at 0%.

That said, the honest answer depends on you rather than on the arithmetic. Over-withholding is a commitment device, and for people who would otherwise spend the extra $150 a check, a forced-savings refund is a reasonable trade. What is genuinely bad is the third option: under-withholding by accident, discovering it in April, and having to find several thousand dollars at short notice.

A practical target is to land within a few hundred dollars either way. Check twice a year, once in January when your pay rate is set and once around July when you can still spread a correction across the remaining checks. If you want to see the outcome rather than the withholding, the tax refund calculator estimates the number you finish the year with, and the income tax calculator works out the total liability that withholding is trying to match.

When you are ready to turn the estimate into a filed return, upload the same W-2s and 1099s to file your taxes online. TaxFile reads box 2 for the tax you already paid in, applies the same 2026 brackets used here, and shows the difference before anything is e-filed. If you also have 1099 income, the self-employment tax calculator handles the 15.3% charge that no employer is withholding for you, and take home pay shows what each check looks like after a W-4 change.