About Pay Desk

Checked on 2026-10-28. Source: this page describes the site's own practice, confirmed against the fact files in this repository.

Pay Desk is a small, independently run site that builds paycheck and pay-rule calculators. It is operated by Spawn Labs, the same team behind a handful of other focused calculator and research sites. We built it because a working person searching for a paycheck calculator deserves a tool that shows its work, not a page of ads wrapped around a guess.

How we check our figures

Every number on this site, from a federal withholding bracket to a state's minimum wage, comes from a named official source: an IRS publication, a state labor department page, a state constitution, or a comparable primary document. We read the source ourselves, record the exact figure and the date we read it, and keep that record in the site's own fact files rather than copying a number from another calculator site. Every page carries a "Checked on" line near its figures so you can see when we last confirmed them and where they came from.

We rebuild the whole site whenever a figure changes, usually around January 1 and July 1 each year, when federal and state tax tables, minimum wages, and payroll-tax rates most often change. A page that has gone stale gets pulled or flagged, not left to quietly show last year's number.

What this site is not

We are not accountants, lawyers, or a payroll service, and nothing here is personalized tax or legal advice. Our calculators estimate what a typical paycheck or deduction looks like under the rules we cite; your own paycheck can differ because of benefits, local ordinances we have not yet added, or a detail specific to your employer. For anything that affects a real filing or a real dispute with an employer, talk to a licensed accountant, a payroll professional, or the state or federal agency that administers the rule.

Why display ads

Pay Desk earns revenue from standard display advertising, the same model most free calculator and reference sites use. We do not sell your data, and we do not accept payment to change a number or a ranking on this site. See our Privacy policy for what advertising partners may collect, and our Methodology and sources page for the full list of sources behind every calculator.

Questions or a correction

If you spot a figure that looks wrong, or a source that has since changed, we want to hear about it before it reaches more readers. Visit our Contact page to send a note, and include the page and the figure you are asking about so we can check it against the source quickly.