Pennsylvania Paycheck Calculator

How Pennsylvania paychecks are calculated

Pennsylvania builds a paycheck differently from almost every state this calculator covers, and the difference is in the order of operations rather than the rates. Illinois starts its withholding at your federal adjusted gross income, so everything that lowers federal wages lowers Illinois wages too. Pennsylvania rebuilds its own compensation base from gross pay and applies its own much shorter list of exclusions — which is why your W-2 Box 16 state wages can be larger than Box 1 federal wages, and why a pay stub from Pittsburgh and a pay stub from Richmond do not behave alike even at the same salary.

Start with gross pay: an annual salary, or hourly rate × hours per week × 52. Take off qualified Section 125 cafeteria-plan premiums for health, dental, vision and life coverage. What survives is Pennsylvania-taxable compensation, and 3.07% applies to all of it. Federal income tax runs separately on federal taxable income, which is your AGI after the standard deduction of $16,100 for single filers. FICA sits on gross wages at 6.2% up to $184,500 and 1.45% beyond that. Your local earned income tax and Local Services Tax close the list.

Every figure here is computed in your browser from the 2026 rules baked into the page. There is no submit button and nothing is stored or sent anywhere, which matters more in Pennsylvania than most states because you are typing your own municipality's rate rather than a number we guessed for you.

Pennsylvania income tax rate

The rate is a flat 3.07%, and the Department of Revenue's published schedule shows that figure holding from 2004 to the present. It is one of the lowest top rates in the country — Pennsylvania does not have a top rate, because the lowest rate is also the highest. Compare the neighbours: New Jersey runs graduated brackets up to 10.75%, New York to 10.9%, Maryland to 5.75%, and Ohio to 3.5%. Only Indiana at 3.15% and Michigan at 4.25% sit near Pennsylvania among big manufacturing states.

What Pennsylvania gives back with a low rate it takes away in two places. First, there is no standard deduction and no personal exemption at the state level at all — the Department of Revenue says so explicitly — so the 3.07% applies to essentially your whole wage rather than to a shrunken taxable figure. Second, local taxation is layered on top by nearly every municipality and school district in the commonwealth, which is where Pennsylvania's much-quoted low rate stops being the whole story.

Why your 401(k) does not lower your Pennsylvania tax

This is the Pennsylvania rule that most paycheck calculators get wrong, including ones that get everything else right. Retirement deferrals reduce federal taxable wages. They do not reduce Pennsylvania-taxable compensation. The Personal Income Tax Guide puts it directly: employee payments and contributions for other benefits, "including dependent care and contributions to an IRC Section 401 plan, are not excludable from Pennsylvania-taxable compensation." The exclusion that does exist covers Section 125 cafeteria-plan premiums for hospitalization, sickness, disability, death coverage, supplemental unemployment benefits and strike benefits — a narrower list than the pre-tax stack most people assume.

The table below shows what the same $10,000 contribution does and does not touch on a $75,000 salary with a 1% local earned income tax. Every number is computed by the engine above.

Read the middle row's Pennsylvania column: $2,303, identical to the first row. The 401(k) saved $2,050 federally and nothing in state or local tax, so the deferral came out of your paycheck without lowering the tax you pay to Harrisburg or to your county collector. The third row works the other way — a smaller premium reduces Pennsylvania and local taxable compensation, because health coverage genuinely is excludable.

Pennsylvania local income tax

Under Act 32, municipalities and school districts levy their own earned income tax on the compensation you earn, and your employer withholds it and sends it to your county's designated collector. There is no single Pennsylvania local tax rate, and no honest calculator can tell you yours: the combined municipality-plus-district figures run from roughly 1% in some counties toward 2% in others, and Philadelphia sits well above all of them. This page therefore asks you for the rate rather than inventing one, and defaults to zero so that you never see a local deduction you do not actually pay.

The rate that gets withheld is decided by a comparison rather than by choice. Per the Department of Community & Economic Development, your employer weighs your Total Resident EIT Rate for the municipality where you live against the Work Location Non-Resident Rate for the municipality where you work, and withholds the higher of the two. Entering both rates here runs that same comparison live, and the note under the second field tells you which one payroll would pick.

These percentages are illustrative, chosen to span the range you are likely to be quoted. None of them is presented as the rate for any named Pennsylvania municipality or school district. Look yours up by address, with its six-digit PSD code, using the DCED local income tax service.

The commuter example makes the rule concrete. Someone earning $60,000 who lives where the total resident rate is 1% but works next door where the non-resident rate is 2.5% gets withheld at 2.5%, which comes to $1,500 rather than $600. That is a real $900 a year that never appears in the state tax conversation.

Pennsylvania Local Services Tax

The LST is not an income tax and should never be blended into the 3.07% figure. It is a flat annual dollar charge for the privilege of working in a municipality or school district, which is why it funds police, fire and road maintenance, and which is also why it does not grow when you get a raise. Somebody earning $40,000 and somebody earning $400,000 pay the same LST to the same employer.

Three rules from DCED shape how it reaches your paycheck, and this calculator applies all three. The total any taxpayer owes in a calendar year is capped at $52 no matter how many Pennsylvania jurisdictions employ them, and a municipality and school district combined cannot levy more than $52 either. Where the combined LST exceeds $10, taxpayers earning under $12,000 there must be exempted — at $10 or below, the exemption is optional, so this page applies it only above that line. And employers collect it in instalments across the year's payroll periods rather than one lump sum, which is why this calculator divides your annual figure evenly by your number of pay periods: a weekly worker sees $1.00, a semi-monthly worker $2.17, a monthly worker $4.33. Only the weekly division comes out round.

Pennsylvania paycheck deductions at a glance

Pennsylvania adds no state-run payroll premium of its own. There is no state disability insurance and no state-funded paid family leave contribution, unlike Washington or California, and unemployment insurance is employer-funded. The one exception is public employment: Penn State Employees' Retirement System and PA State Employees' Retirement System members contribute 0.7%–3% of pay, and unusually for a mandatory retirement contribution, Pennsylvania adds those dollars back to taxable compensation rather than excluding them. State workers should treat the Pennsylvania figure here as slightly generous for that reason.

Federal income tax and FICA

Federal tax is by a wide margin the largest deduction on a Pennsylvania paycheck, and the only progressive layer. For a single filer, federal income tax on the default $75,000 salary runs $7,670 against Pennsylvania's $2,303 — more than three times the state figure. The 2026 brackets below apply after the standard deduction of $16,100 single, $32,200 joint, $24,150 head of household, plus $2,050 per qualifying factor for age 65 or older or blind.

FICA ignores every pre-tax deduction you make, Pennsylvania or otherwise. Social Security takes 6.2% up to $184,500 for 2026, then stops for the rest of the year. Medicare takes 1.45% on every dollar with no ceiling, plus 0.9% above $200,000 single or $250,000 joint. That $200,000 threshold is not indexed for inflation and has sat there since 2013, so it catches steadily more Pennsylvania households each year without any legislation at all.

Weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, and monthly pay in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's flat rate makes frequency almost cosmetic: 3.07% of annual compensation divided across 52, 26, 24, or 12 periods gives the same yearly total, and your local earned income tax behaves the same way because Act 32 rates apply to compensation rather than to a per-payroll table. The Local Services Tax is the exception with real friction, because it is a flat annual charge rather than a percentage, so this calculator divides the $52 ceiling evenly by your payroll periods. Weekly that is a clean $1.00 × 52 = $52. At 24 or 12 periods the instalment is $2.17 or $4.33, and because each per-paycheck figure is shown to the cent, multiplying it back across the year drifts a cent or two off $52 — a display-rounding quirk, not an extra tax you owe.

Bi-weekly (26 checks) and semi-monthly (24 checks) are genuinely different schedules: bi-weekly produces two extra paychecks a year, not two larger ones. Social Security is the one line that shifts between them, since it stops once year-to-date wages pass $184,500.

Pennsylvania hourly paycheck calculator

Switch "How are you paid?" to Hourly and enter your rate and typical weekly hours. The calculator annualises on the standard payroll convention — hourly rate × hours per week × 52 — then runs the identical federal, FICA, Pennsylvania and local layers used for salaried workers. At $25 an hour for 40 hours, on a weekly schedule with a 1% earned income tax, that is $52,000 gross, $1,596 Pennsylvania tax, $520 local, $4,060 federal, and about $805 take-home per check.

Hourly work in Pennsylvania has one quirk worth knowing: your employer withholds local tax based on where you physically report, so a role that sends you between sites in different counties can produce a worksite rate you did not expect. Remote workers count the municipality where they actually perform the work as their worksite, not their employer's headquarters — which is why a Pennsylvania resident working from home for a Philadelphia-headquartered company may owe their own locality's rate rather than Philadelphia's.

Pennsylvania salary paycheck calculator

For a salaried worker the annual figure is given and the question is what each check is worth. Pennsylvania converts salary to a pay period by simple division and applies the same flat rate to the result, which is the cleanest behaviour of any state in this calculator's roster — no bracket to annualise into, no allowance to apportion, no phase-out to trip over mid-year.

Where the flat rate stops helping is negotiation. Because Pennsylvania's 3.07% has no brackets, a raise never costs you anything at the margin in state tax, but a job location change can, because crossing into a higher-rate municipality raises your local tax on every dollar you earn. Two Pennsylvania offers at the same salary are not the same offer if they sit in different counties, and the difference is worth several hundred dollars a year at a $75,000 salary — visible in the table above.

Salaried Pennsylvania workers drawing a bonus should also note the local side: Act 32 compensation includes bonuses and commissions, so incentive pay is subject to your earned income tax as well as federal supplemental withholding and the 3.07% state rate.

Pennsylvania take-home pay examples

Every number in these three examples came from the engine running above — none of it is estimated by hand. Change the inputs and your own results replace them instantly.

The gap between the first two cards is the local tax story in one line: the same $75,000 salary, $802 apart in annual take-home, entirely because of where the work sits on a map.

What this calculator does not model

Honest limits, because two of them can move your number materially.

• PA Taxable Income Deduction and Schedule SP Tax Forgiveness. Both are annual PA-40 return items rather than withholding, so they do not appear in a paycheck estimate. Tax forgiveness can cut or eliminate Pennsylvania tax for genuinely lower-income households — worth checking on the return if that describes you.
• Your specific local rate. Thousands of Pennsylvania jurisdictions each set their own, and this page has no rate table to fall back on. The estimate is only as good as the numbers you look up for yourself.
• Military retirement pay. Pennsylvania exempts it entirely, but it is not wages on a paycheck, so the toggle does nothing here — applying it to salary would understate your tax. Federal age and blindness deductions still flow through the shared federal layer.
• PSRS/PERS employee contributions. Mandatory for Pennsylvania public employees and, unusually, added back into taxable compensation rather than excluded.

Payroll providers publish their own Pennsylvania calculators, and you may have seen an ADP or SmartAsset result while looking for this one. No third-party payroll service is connected to this page and PayAtlasUSA is not affiliated with any of them. Where a competitor's answer disagrees with the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, the Department's guidance is what this engine follows.

Moving to or from Pennsylvania?

Take-home comparisons use the same withholding engines as the paycheck calculators — federal, FICA, and state lines side by side.

• California → Pennsylvania→

  California progressive brackets up to 13.3% and 1.3% SDI versus Pennsylvania 3.07% flat tax, 0.07% UC, and affordable housing.

• Pennsylvania → Florida→

  Pennsylvania 3.07% flat tax and local EIT versus Florida 0% personal income tax — compare take-home pay, housing, and homeowners insurance.

• Florida → Pennsylvania→

  Florida 0% personal income tax versus Pennsylvania 3.07% flat tax — compare take-home pay, affordable housing, and escaping Florida home insurance.

• New York → Pennsylvania→

  New York graduated brackets up to 10.9% plus NYC tax versus Pennsylvania flat 3.07% tax — compare take-home pay, housing affordability, and property taxes.

• Pennsylvania → California→

  Pennsylvania flat 3.07% tax versus California progressive brackets up to 13.3% and 1.3% SDI — compare take-home pay, housing affordability, and wage premiums.

Related tools

PayAtlasUSA is an independent salary research site. It is not affiliated with ADP, Gusto, SmartAsset, or any payroll provider, and no third-party payroll service is connected to this calculator.