How to read a pay stub (and check the math yourself)

Most people glance at one number on a pay stub, the amount that hit their bank account, and ignore the rest. That's a mistake, because the rest is the only explanation you'll ever get of where the gap between your salary and your take-home went. The good news is that a pay stub looks more complicated than it is. Every one, from every employer and every payroll system, answers the same three questions in the same order.

Read your pay stub in three passes. First, what you earned: your gross pay, the total before anything is taken out. Second, what was taken out: taxes first, then your benefit and other deductions. Third, what's left: your net pay, the take-home number. Once you can find those three regions on the page, every line on the stub fits into one of them. The fourth thing to know is that each line usually has two amounts next to it: the figure for this pay period, and the year-to-date (YTD) running total since January 1.

That's the whole method. The sections below go region by region, decode the abbreviations that make stubs look like a foreign language, and then do the part no one teaches: checking that the numbers on your own stub actually add up.

What's actually on a pay stub

A pay stub, also called a pay statement or earnings statement, is the itemized record behind a single payment. The paycheck is the money; the stub is the explanation. If you're paid by direct deposit, the stub is often the only piece of paper (or PDF) you get, which makes it the one document that shows the full story of your pay. The deposit it produces shows up as a single line on your bank statement, the other half of the same money trail.

Almost every stub has these regions, usually in this order from top to bottom:

• Header. Your name and address, your employer's name, your pay period (the range of dates you worked), and your pay date (when you're actually paid). The pay period and the pay date are not the same, and they're often a week or more apart.
• Earnings. Your gross pay, frequently broken into lines: regular hours, overtime, holiday, paid time off, bonus, or commission. For hourly workers this shows the hours and the rate; for salaried workers it shows the period's share of your annual salary.
• Taxes. Federal income tax, state and local income tax where they apply, and the two FICA taxes, Social Security and Medicare.
• Deductions. Everything else taken out: retirement contributions, health and other insurance premiums, and any post-tax items like a Roth contribution or a garnishment.
• Net pay. The take-home number, and often the breakdown of which account it was deposited into.
• Year-to-date totals. A second column next to most lines, showing the running total for the year.

Some stubs add a leave-balances box (your remaining vacation and sick hours) and an employer-contributions box (what your company paid on your behalf, like its half of Social Security or its 401(k) match). Those employer lines are informational. They tell you what your job costs your employer, but they don't come out of your take-home.

Hover or tap any line below to see what it means.

Why your take-home is so much less than your salary

The first time anyone looks closely at a stub, the same question comes up: where did the rest of it go? The gap between gross and net is the sum of three different kinds of subtraction, and they stack.

Taxes

Federal income tax is withheld based on the Form W-4 you filled out when you started, not on a flat percentage. The more allowances and adjustments you claimed, the less is held back. State and local income tax work similarly where they exist; a handful of states have no broad income tax, so those lines may be missing entirely.

Then there's FICA, which is the part that confuses people most, because it isn't one tax. FICA stands for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, and it covers two separate payroll taxes:

• Social Security, often labeled OASDI, is 6.2% of your wages up to an annual limit called the wage base. For 2026 that limit is $184,500, per the Social Security Administration. Earn more than that in a year and the Social Security line stops partway through, because there's nothing left to tax.
• Medicare, often labeled MED or HI, is 1.45% of all your wages with no cap. High earners pay an extra 0.9% on wages over $200,000 a year, per the IRS.

Your employer pays a matching 6.2% and 1.45% you never see on your own stub. When a line ends in EE, that's your share as the employee; an ER suffix is the employer's share.

Pre-tax deductions

These come out of your pay before income tax is calculated, which is what makes them valuable: they shrink the wage figure your tax is based on. A traditional 401(k) or 403(b) contribution, your share of health, dental, and vision premiums, and money you put into an FSA or HSA through payroll are the common ones, with one wrinkle worth knowing: a traditional 401(k) lowers your income-tax wages but is still taxed for Social Security and Medicare. Cafeteria-plan benefits like your health premium escape both. This is why two pre-tax lines can affect your taxable wages differently, and it's the reason the numbers on your W-2 won't all match.

Post-tax deductions

These come out after taxes, so they don't lower your taxable wages at all. A Roth 401(k) contribution, union dues, a post-tax life or disability premium, and any court-ordered garnishment (for child support, a creditor, or a tax levy) live here.

Add the three groups together and, for most workers, taxes and benefit deductions take somewhere between a fifth and a third of gross pay before the money ever lands. That's normal. What's not normal is never checking that the subtractions are right, which we'll get to.

The pay stub decoder

Pay stubs are written in abbreviations, and most guides decode only the handful their own example happens to use. Here's a fuller decoder, grouped the same way the stub is: what you earned, what was taxed, what was deducted, and the employer-side codes that are there for information only. If a code on your stub isn't here, it's almost always a variant of one of these.

A few of these trip up nearly everyone. FICA is two taxes, not one. OASDI is just Social Security. HI is just Medicare. A Cafe125 or Sec125 line isn't a deduction you chose; it's the tax rule that makes your insurance premiums pre-tax. And group-term life over $50,000 (GTL or Imp Life) is phantom income: it raises your taxable wages without being cash you can spend, which is why it can make your taxable pay look higher than your actual earnings.

Same stub, different words

There is no standard vocabulary, and that's the single most common reason a stub looks unreadable: yours uses none of the words the article you're reading uses. We'd know. Granite reads pay stubs from every major payroll provider, and the same line is labeled differently on almost every one. The same Social Security tax is printed as OASDI on one system, SS on another, and Fed OASDI/EE on a third. Take-home pay is called net, deposit, or check amount depending on who built the software.

So instead of memorizing one provider's labels, learn the concept and recognize its aliases. These are the lines that get relabeled most often:

The trick that works every time: don't read the label, read the position. Social Security is always 6.2% of a wage figure. Medicare is always 1.45%. Find the line that's 6.2% of your gross and you've found Social Security no matter what your employer's software decided to call it. This is exactly the problem Granite solves by reading the document itself: it pulls the gross, the taxes, and the deductions off any stub and normalizes them into the same set of fields, so a stub from a new job lines up next to your old one without you re-learning a new dialect.

Check your stub's math

Payroll errors happen, and the person with the strongest reason to notice is you. In a 2022 survey of payroll and HR managers conducted by EY and sponsored by the payroll company Paycom, the companies surveyed reported an average payroll accuracy rate of about 80%. That's a self-reported employer figure, not an audit of actual paychecks, and we couldn't find any reliable number for how often workers catch errors themselves. But the direction is clear enough: errors are common, and no one is checking your stub for you. Three checks take about two minutes.

1. Gross minus pre-tax deductions equals your taxable wages. Take your gross pay, subtract your 401(k), health premiums, and any other pre-tax lines, and you should land on the wage figure your federal income tax was calculated from (a line often labeled federal taxable wages). One catch: this is not the same base your Social Security and Medicare tax used. Those don't subtract a traditional 401(k), so they're figured on a higher number, and it's normal for the three wage bases to differ.
2. Earnings minus every tax and deduction equals net. Start from gross, subtract every tax line and every deduction line (pre-tax and post-tax), and the result should be your net pay to the penny. If it doesn't, a line is wrong, missing, or one you didn't authorize. The one exception is imputed income like group-term life over $50,000: it adds to your taxable wages but isn't cash you receive, so subtract it back out before this should tie.
3. Each YTD total equals the sum of your stubs. Your year-to-date gross should equal this period's gross plus the immediately previous stub's YTD gross. The same holds for every line. A YTD total that jumps or resets is the easiest error to spot and the most expensive to miss, because YTD is what becomes your W-2.

The hardest one to do by hand is the third, because it means keeping every stub and adding them up. That's the kind of running total software is good at: ask Granite how much you've paid in federal tax or put into your 401(k) this year and it sums it across every stub you've dropped in and shows you the source. Whether you use a tool or a spreadsheet, the habit is the point. Check the stub the period it arrives, while you still remember what changed.

Your pay stub and your W-2

Your final pay stub of the year is a preview of your W-2. The year-to-date totals on that last stub are the same figures that show up in the boxes on the form, which means you can check your W-2 for errors before you file, instead of trusting it blind. (For the other side of this, our guide to how to read a W-2 decodes every box.) Here's how the YTD lines map across:

The mapping also explains the question that confuses people every spring: why the wages in Box 1 don't match your salary, and why the three wage boxes don't match each other. Box 1 is lower because your pre-tax 401(k) was subtracted before it was calculated. Box 5 (Medicare wages) is usually the highest, because 401(k) money is still taxed for Medicare and there's no cap. Box 3 (Social Security wages) sits in between, capped at the wage base. If your final stub's YTD figures don't line up with your W-2 boxes, raise it with payroll before April, not after.

When tax season comes, the pay stub is one of several records you'll want in one place. Our guide to the documents you need for tax season covers the rest.

Is your employer required to give you one?

Surprisingly, there's no federal law that says your employer has to hand you a pay stub. Federal law (the Fair Labor Standards Act) requires employers to keep payroll records, but it doesn't require them to give you a statement of those records. The requirement to furnish a stub is set state by state, and the states fall into roughly four groups:

• No requirement. A handful of states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee, don't require employers to provide a stub at all.
• Access states. Most states require employers to give you a stub you can access, on paper or electronically.
• Access and print states. Some, including California, Texas, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, require a stub that's printed or can be printed.
• Opt-out states. A few default to electronic stubs but let you request paper.

The exact list shifts as states change their rules, so if you're not receiving a stub and want to know your rights, check your own state's labor department, which is the authority for the state you actually work in. Either way, you're entitled to know how your pay was calculated, and a reasonable employer will provide a stub on request even where it isn't strictly required.

What to do with it, and how long to keep it

A pay stub has two jobs after you've read it: proving your income, and double-checking your W-2. Both have a time limit.

Keep each stub until you've checked it against your year-end W-2 and the year-to-date totals match. Hold the full year of stubs for about a year after that, because that's the window in which a lender, a landlord, or a benefits office is most likely to ask you to prove income. Once the W-2 is reconciled, the form becomes the long-term record and the individual stubs have done their job. If you're ever disputing wages, hours, or unemployment, keep the relevant stubs longer. For the full picture of how long to hold pay stubs alongside tax and financial records, see how long to keep important documents, or use the document retention timeline to get a keep-and-shred date for any document type.

A practical note on storage: a pay stub carries your name, your income, and often the last digits of your Social Security number, so it's not something to leave in an email inbox or a shared drive. Whatever system you keep it in should be one you trust with that, which is why Granite encrypts every document at rest.

None of this is tax or financial advice, and the figures here are general guidance current for the 2026 tax year, not a verdict on your specific paycheck. Granite reads and organizes the pay stubs you already have; it isn't payroll software and can't fix an error for you. What it can do is read each stub the moment it lands, pull out the numbers that matter, file it under the right year, and keep the running totals so the checks above stop being a chore. If you're a contractor paid on a 1099 rather than a W-2, your income records look different, and Granite for solo businesses is built for that.