About Salary Take-Home
Salary Take-Home is a free tax calculator that estimates what actually reaches your bank account after income tax, social insurance, pension and local taxes — for 12 countries and all 51 United States taxing jurisdictions.
What separates this site from most salary calculators is not the arithmetic. It is that every single tax figure used here is published alongside the authority it came from and how far we have been able to confirm it. If a number is weak, we say so on the page where it is used, next to the result it affects. We think a calculator that tells you where its numbers came from is more useful than one that simply shows a confident total.
Who runs this site
This site is built and maintained by Deukjoo Bae, an independent developer working on international compensation tooling. It is not affiliated with any tax authority, payroll provider, accounting firm or employer, and no company pays for placement or favourable treatment here. The only revenue is display advertising, which has no influence on the tax figures — the figures are constrained by published sources, not by commercial interest.
Questions, corrections and error reports go to qoemrwn9639@gmail.com. Corrections are genuinely welcome; see Reporting an error below.
How the numbers are produced
Every tax constant in this project — each bracket boundary, each contribution rate, each deduction — is stored with three things attached: the value, the issuing authority it came from, and a confidence grade describing how directly we verified it.
There are three grades, and they mean specific things:
- Verified — confirmed against the tax authority's own publication, such as a government revenue department page or the statute itself.
- Secondary — taken from a reputable consolidated reference rather than the primary authority. Usable, but one step removed from the source.
- Unverified — we could not obtain a source we were willing to stand behind. The figure is our best available estimate and is labelled as such on the page, with a note explaining what is missing.
You can inspect all of this yourself. Each country's tax rates page lists the complete rate schedule with its source and grade, so nothing is hidden behind a summary — see South Korea, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Ireland, Netherlands or United Arab Emirates.
All 12 countries now use the 2026 tax year — for the United Kingdom that means 2026-27, for Australia and Hong Kong 2026/27, and for Singapore income earned in 2026 (assessed in 2027) — and none of them contains an unverified figure. Most figures are confirmed against the tax authority's or social insurance agency's own publication. Where we have only a reputable secondary reference, the figure is graded secondary rather than presented as confirmed: this is the case for Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, one Irish figure, and South Korea's income tax brackets, deductions and credit, local income tax and employment insurance rate, which rest on a secondary 2026 summary while the amended legislation itself has not yet been checked at first hand. (Germany's income tax now uses the exact continuous §32a EStG formula rather than a flat-rate approximation, which had been understating tax by roughly 9% at a typical salary.) Each country's page shows every figure with its grade, so the less settled parts are visible rather than presented at equal footing.
The United States, state by state
Four jurisdictions — Washington, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota — are confirmed directly against the state revenue department's own publication.
The remaining jurisdictions rest on a consolidated reference table. That table was not accepted on trust: we cross-checked it against two primary sources chosen to test different failure modes — one flat-rate state and one complete graduated schedule including every threshold. Both matched exactly. That result justifies building on the table, and it is the honest reason those states are graded secondary rather than verified. An automated test pins the verified list to those four so that the distinction cannot quietly erode.
United States territories such as Puerto Rico are deliberately excluded, because federal tax applies differently there and cannot be combined with the federal calculation this site performs.
What this calculator cannot tell you
Tax accuracy is a spectrum, not a yes-or-no property, and we would rather be specific about the gaps than issue a blanket disclaimer.
Several jurisdictions are known to be modelled incompletely. Some omit a local income tax that can rival the state tax itself. Some understate tax at higher incomes because the jurisdiction switches to a computation this model does not reproduce. Some treat a deduction in a way that makes the result read slightly high or slightly low. Each affected page states its own limitation above the number it affects, and the current list is maintained on that jurisdiction's tax rates page rather than duplicated here, so that it stays accurate as fixes land.
Beyond that, every result on this site assumes a single salaried income with standard deductions. It does not model dependants, tax credits, joint filing, self-employment, equity compensation, pension elections, employer benefits or residency changes. Any of those can move your real figure substantially.
Currency comparison
The comparison tool converts one salary into each country's own currency before applying that country's tax, so the ranking compares the same amount of money rather than the same number. Conversion uses European Central Bank reference rates, retrieved live and displayed with their publication date. If that request fails, the site falls back to a stored snapshot and says on screen that it is doing so, rather than presenting a stale rate as current. The one exception is the UAE dirham, which the European Central Bank does not publish: it is converted at its fixed US dollar peg, and the comparison results say so whenever the dirham is involved.
The results also state what the comparison cannot settle: a ranking rests on one day's exchange rate, and equal take-home pay is not an equal standard of living.
How often this is updated
Tax data is versioned by tax year. When a new year's rates are published, they are added as a new dataset rather than edited over the old one, so prior-year results remain reproducible. Each page shows the tax year it used and the date the underlying data last changed — not the date the page was built, which would imply freshness the data does not have.
Calculation logic is covered by an automated test suite that asserts the full breakdown — income tax, social insurance, pension, local tax and state tax — at low, middle and high salaries for all 12 countries and every United States jurisdiction. Its purpose is to ensure that a future change cannot silently alter a country's numbers without producing a visible, explainable difference.
Privacy
There is no account and no form submission of your salary — it is never stored by anything we operate. The comparison tool runs entirely in your browser. Result pages are rendered on the server — for common salaries from a page built in advance, otherwise computed when you ask for it — so in that case the figure does reach our server as part of the request, even though it is never written down.
Two exceptions: the home page shows today's page-view total and which country-and-salary-band combinations have been calculated most recently, from small anonymous counters; and when you add your own spending item on a result page, its name and amount are saved anonymously with your country and salary band. Neither ever includes your exact salary or an identifier tied to you — both are described in full in Privacy Policy.
One caveat we would rather state plainly than leave for you to discover: result page addresses contain the salary figure in the URL, so that value can appear in ordinary web server logs and in referrer headers. The comparison tool does not have this property. Where you can copy a link to a result, the interface warns you that the link contains the amount.
Aggregate analytics are used to understand which pages are worth improving. Where events record an income level, they record a band such as 75k–100k, never the amount you entered — sending an individual's income to a third party is not a reasonable price for that insight. The full scope is set out in our Privacy Policy.
This is not tax advice
Everything here is an estimate produced by a simplified model, published for general information. It is not tax, legal or financial advice, it does not create a professional relationship, and it must not be used as the basis for filing a return, negotiating compensation or making a relocation decision. For anything that depends on being right, consult a qualified tax professional or accountant licensed in the relevant jurisdiction. Our Terms of Service and Disclaimer set this out in full.
Reporting an error
If a figure here disagrees with your own tax authority, the tax authority is right and we want to know. The most useful report includes the country or state, the salary, the figure you expected, and the source you are comparing against.
Email qoemrwn9639@gmail.com. You can also run a calculation and include the resulting link, which contains everything needed to reproduce what you saw.