Changelog

The paper trail

Every verification and correction, dated. Tax data changes on a schedule - this page proves we follow it.

Every data verification, coverage addition, and correction, in reverse order. Dates are the day we read the official source, not the day a rumor circulated.

August 13, 2026 — the local line: from one anchored state to five

  • The thinnest half of what we publish is the city and county line, and until today only New York gave us an agency worked example to replay. Four more states now do. Indiana: its Departmental Notice #1 example turned out to carry not five exemptions but four separate counts that add up — personal, additional dependent, first-time dependent and adopted child, two of them read off the same table. With those, the state figure and the county figure both reproduce to the cent. Detroit: Form 5469’s worked example, to the cent. Portland: the Metro and Multnomah employer handbooks publish three 2026 examples, all reproduced.
  • Maryland is a fifth case and a different one: its guide contains no worked example at all, but it publishes complete tables whose rate is the state and county rates added together. We now replay all 973 of their cells against the rate schedule the state publishes separately — a second document judging the first — which anchors both lines at once. Every one of the 133 annual and 140 quarterly cells matches exactly. The list of cells we do not reproduce is published in full.
  • That replay found ten errors in the guide itself, now in the register. The costliest: on three pages the top quarterly row for married filers starts at $300,000 but instructs the employer to take the excess over $250,000 — $4,450 too much per quarter at one county rate. Elsewhere a cumulative amount is copied from the row above (understating by $687.47 a month), a rate skips a step, and two tables overstate the tax.
  • Superseding what we wrote on August 7 below: Indiana’s deduction-constant tables are in Departmental Notice #1, on page 2. We had not reached them then; we have now transcribed all eighty cells and they are re-checked on every build. Michigan, likewise, does publish a worked example. Both pages now carry the badge.

August 12, 2026 — Missouri: the 1% earnings tax was too small here

  • Finding the Ohio problem below made us check every other state where we apply a local rate. Missouri had the same class of error, in a different shape. The St. Louis and Kansas City earnings tax is charged on gross wages with no standard deduction — the city’s own return goes from “Gross salaries, wages, etc.” straight to “Earnings Tax (1% of line 4)”. We were applying the 1% after Missouri’s $16,100 standard deduction, which understated it by $161 a year for anyone who entered a city rate. Corrected.
  • One thing does come out of that base, and getting this half right matters: Missouri’s enabling statute excludes “contributions to any deferred compensation plans, including … salary reduction plans, cafeteria plans”. So your 401(k) and cafeteria premiums are outside the earnings tax — unlike Ohio, where the city taxes them. Two states, both charging on gross, opposite answers on the same contribution. Jumping to full gross would have been a second error in the other direction.
  • What we could not read: any Kansas City document. kcmo.gov refuses our requests at the host level, returning 403 even on its robots file, so Kansas City rests here on the state statute that empowers both cities rather than on a form of its own, and its 1% rate is not confirmed from a Kansas City source. The St. Louis form carries no printed tax year either.

August 12, 2026 — Indiana and Maryland: checked, and unchanged

  • A verification with nothing to fix is still worth publishing. After Ohio and Missouri we checked the other two states where a local tax sits on top, and both genuinely do share their state’s base. Indiana’s county tax is imposed “on the adjusted gross income of local taxpayers”, and Indiana’s definition of that income already has the exemptions subtracted inside it. Maryland’s county tax is a percentage “of an individual’s Maryland taxable income”, the same line 20 its state tax uses — so much so that Maryland’s withholding tables apply a single combined state-and-local rate to one taxable income figure.
  • Neither shows the Ohio divergence, and 401(k) contributions are outside the base at both levels in both states. Nothing changed in the calculator; we are recording the check so the question does not get asked again from scratch.

August 12, 2026 — Ohio: your city does not tax what the state taxes

  • The larger of two corrections, and the one worth reading if you work in an Ohio city. Ohio municipalities do not tax your state taxable income — they tax “qualifying wages”, essentially the Medicare wages box on your W-2. Two things follow, and we had both wrong: the state personal exemption does not reduce your city tax, and your 401(k) contributions are taxed by your city even though Ohio exempts them. Our city line was running about $43 a year low on a $60,000 salary at a 2% rate, and about $163 low for someone putting $6,000 into a 401(k). Fixed, and now explained on the Ohio page.
  • Second correction: Ohio’s personal exemption is not a single amount. It is $2,400 per exemption up to $40,000 of income, $2,150 up to $80,000, and $1,900 above that. We were applying $2,400 to everyone, which showed anyone in the middle band about $7 a year too little state tax. It also means an extra dollar of pay at $40,000 leaves you about $6 worse off, and $13 if you file jointly — a real step in the law, which the page now shows rather than smooths away.
  • What we could not read, and therefore do not publish: Cincinnati’s 2026 rate, and the text of Ohio Revised Code 718.01(R) itself. Ohio’s legislative servers refuse our requests, so the definition above is cited through the municipal documents that reproduce it rather than from the statute. The exemption amounts are Ohio’s 2025 figures, because the indexed 2026 ones have not been published.

August 12, 2026 — Arizona: we had the default election wrong

  • Our Arizona page assumed you had elected 2.5% withholding on Form A-4. Arizona’s statutory default, when no A-4 is on file, is 2.0% — stated word for word in both the 2026 employee form and the 2026 employer instructions. The gap we published between what is withheld and what you owe was therefore four times too large: about $402 a year on a $60,000 salary where the honest figure is about $102. Corrected, and the page now shows both elections side by side, because in Arizona the gap is set by the box you tick, not by the state’s formula.
  • Arizona has not published its 2026 standard deduction. The $16,100 we use is the federal figure that Arizona’s own indexation rule points to, and the state’s own estimated-tax form still tells taxpayers to estimate 2026 with the 2025 amount — about nine dollars of tax apart. The page says so rather than let a clean number imply a certainty the state has not given.
  • Arizona is now the fifth case on withholding vs what you owe. Its annual tax was checked by an independent derivation that reached $1,097.50 against our $1,097.50 — a second hand doing the arithmetic from the statute and the state’s forms, with no access to our code. We mark that as a weaker kind of corroboration than a calculator built by other people, and we do not blend the two.

August 12, 2026 — Maryland: one number here is inferred, and now says so

  • Maryland’s 2026 withholding sheets print the $3,400 standard deduction for single filers, but the state has not yet printed the joint and head-of-household amount. We use $6,800, which is the 2:1 ratio the legislature fixed for 2025 carried onto the published 2026 single figure. That reasoning was in our source notes but not in plain sight, which was inconsistent of us — we had flagged a one-dollar uncertainty in Louisiana and said nothing here. The page now tells you.

August 7, 2026 — a third official document caught out

  • Oklahoma’s 2026 withholding tables tell employers that the married semi-monthly bracket above $1,129 is “$12.19 plus 4.5%”. The rate table printed directly beneath that sentence says $9.10, and the example’s own arithmetic uses $9.10. An employer following the sentence over-withholds about $3 a pay period. It is on the corrections page with the numbers.
  • Oklahoma does not have a calculator page here yet, on purpose. Its 2026 withholding tables are published, but the annual rate schedule for 2026 is not, and the current return packet is the 2025 one. We would have to guess at the brackets, and guessing is the one thing this site does not do.

August 7, 2026 — Alabama, where federal tax cuts your state bill

  • Alabama lets you deduct your federal income tax before it works out what you owe the state, which almost no other state does. A larger federal bill therefore produces a smaller Alabama one. We model it on both sides, in the withholding formula and in the annual figure, and the state’s own worked example comes out to the cent at $29.59.
  • Two other Alabama peculiarities are now in the engine: a standard deduction that steps down as income rises, $25 at a time per $500 earned, and brackets whose 5% top rate starts at $3,000 of taxable income for a single filer. In practice almost every Alabama salary is taxed at 5% on most of its income.
  • City occupational licence taxes, Birmingham included, are not in the calculator. Their rates were not readable at an official source when the page was built, and the page says so.

August 7, 2026 — Kentucky, at 3.5%

  • Kentucky cut its flat rate to 3.5% for 2026 and grants a single $3,360 standard deduction, the same for every filing status. Both figures come from the state’s own withholding formula, whose worked example our engine reproduces to the cent.
  • A dating trap worth knowing: the department’s employer page states 3.5% for 2026 while its individual income tax page still shows 4%, the rate for the year now being filed. A calculator that reads the wrong page will show you 4% for a 2026 paycheck.
  • The same official PDF contains an arithmetic slip in its second example, now recorded on the corrections page: it prints $35,730 where its own numbers give $35,640, and drops the cents from a result its first example keeps.
  • Kentucky’s local occupational taxes are not in this calculator. Louisville and Lexington refused our requests for their rate pages, and we will not invent a local rate. The page says so, and gives the rough order of magnitude instead.

August 7, 2026 — the four states with no income tax

  • Alaska, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming now have their own pages, taking the site to 30 states and the District of Columbia.
  • Alaska is not the plain zero people expect. It is one of the few states where the employee pays into unemployment insurance: 0.50% of wages up to $54,200 in 2026, capped at $271 a year, read from the state labour department’s own rate table. On a $75,000 salary that is the difference between $1,927.65 and $1,938.08 a fortnight, and most quick calculators show Alaska as a flat zero.
  • New Hampshire has never taxed wages, and the interest and dividends tax that made it a "no income tax, except" state was repealed after 2024. The exception is gone.

August 7, 2026 — Massachusetts, on the bonus calculator

  • Massachusetts publishes exactly one worked example, and it is a bonus, not a salary. So it now validates the bonus calculator rather than the state page: below the surtax threshold the state withholds 5% of a supplemental payment, and above it the lesser of 9% of the payment or 9% of the excess plus 5% of the rest. Our implementation reproduces the state’s own $24,854 example exactly.
  • The state page still carries no “matches the agency” badge, and that is deliberate. A bonus example proves nothing about a regular paycheck.

August 7, 2026 — Nevada, and a word about our own sources

  • Nevada joins the list: no state income tax, no local wage tax, nothing withheld by the state. The taxes Nevada does levy on employment — the Modified Business Tax and unemployment insurance — are the employer’s bill and never appear on your stub.
  • Both of Nevada’s sources are marked secondary, and we say why: the legislature’s site refuses our requests and the archived copy of the constitutional page is only a table of contents, while the tax department serves a JavaScript shell. We would rather label a source honestly than dress it up.
  • That label now appears on the page that uses the source, not just on the methodology page. If a figure rests on something less than an official document, you can see it where the figure is.

August 7, 2026 — salary to hourly, and overtime

  • Salary to hourly, both directions, with the two assumptions kept on the page: hours a week and paid weeks a year. The usual 2,080-hour shortcut turns $60,000 into $28.85 an hour; a 37.5-hour week makes it $30.77, and 48 paid weeks make it $33.33. Same salary.
  • Overtime, with the federal weekly rule quoted from 29 CFR 778.107 and California's daily rule from the state labor agency — time and a half past eight hours in a day, double time past twelve. The two never stack on the same hour: the more favourable rule wins, hour by hour, which is where most quick calculators go wrong.

August 7, 2026 — a calculator for bonuses

  • New tool: what actually comes out of a bonus. The federal flat 22% (and the mandatory 37% above a million dollars of supplemental wages) comes straight from IRS Publication 15; Social Security stops at the annual wage base, which is why the same bonus is withheld differently in January and in November.
  • State rates only where the agency publishes one: North Carolina 4.09%, Missouri 4.7%, Oregon 8%, Wisconsin in bands from 3.54% to 7.65%. Everywhere else the page says there is no verifiable flat rate and explains the aggregate method, rather than showing a number we cannot source.

August 7, 2026 — Missouri and Arizona, and where we stop

  • Missouri now follows Form 4282: annualize, subtract the filing-status deduction, walk the state’s brackets, divide, round. One trap worth knowing: “married and spouse works” is a checkbox on the MO W-4, not a filing status, and it halves the deduction to the single-filer level.
  • Arizona is different in kind: there is no state schedule to reproduce. Its law makes withholding a percentage the employee elects on Form A-4, so we treat that rate as an input rather than pretending to have verified a constant — and the stub says which election it assumes.
  • Where we stopped, and why (superseded on August 13 for Indiana and Michigan — see the entry above): at this date we had not located Indiana’s deduction-constant tables, Massachusetts published only a bonus example, which would not validate a regular paycheck, and we had found no worked example for Pennsylvania or Michigan. Those four pages kept their sourced figures and did not carry the badge.

August 7, 2026 — a page of its own for Illinois

  • Illinois had been living under our Chicago page. It now has its own calculator, built around the thing nobody explains: Form IL-W-4 carries two allowance lines worth different amounts — $2,925 each on Line 1, $1,000 each on Line 2 — which is why a flat 4.95% almost never comes to 4.95% of your pay.

August 7, 2026 — South Carolina, Virginia and Oregon

  • Three more states now compute withholding from their agency’s own formula. South Carolina is the striking one: its 2026 withholding tables still run on the pre-reform 3% and 6% brackets, even though the income tax itself was reformed to 1.99% and 5.21% — so that is what employers are actually withholding this year, and it is why a South Carolina paycheck and a South Carolina tax return can tell different stories.
  • Virginia’s formula rounds the annual tax to a whole dollar before dividing it across pay periods; without that step our figure would have been two cents light on the state’s own example. Virginia also states plainly that its printed tables are approximate — so we hold ourselves to the formula, not the tables.
  • Oregon subtracts your federal withholding before applying its brackets. Every number we encoded was proven to appear in the official PDF before it went in, and the stub says plainly that the federal figure it feeds the formula is our annual estimate, not what your employer actually withheld.

August 7, 2026 — Illinois, and two assumptions the tables corrected

  • Illinois withholding now follows the automated payroll method of Booklet IL-700-T. Checking our formula against all 1,436 cells of the booklet’s own tables corrected two things we had assumed: the published tables do not round the exemption to the cent, and Illinois divides the annual exemption by 365 days for a daily payroll, not by the 260 working days used elsewhere. With both fixed, every one of the 1,436 cells matches.
  • Ten jurisdictions now compute withholding the way their agency documents it, and each carries the proof on its own page: New York, New York City, Yonkers, Utah, New Jersey, California, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Illinois.

August 7, 2026 — North Carolina, and what a single example cannot prove

  • North Carolina’s withholding now follows NC-30 directly. The guide prints only one worked example, and it rounds to a whole dollar — we measured that replacing the 4.09% withholding rate with the 3.99% income tax rate left that example unchanged, so it could not have caught the mistake. The state’s published wage-bracket tables can: we rebuild all 23,760 cells from the agency’s own formula and every one matches, and a sample now sits in our test corpus, where that same substitution breaks 24 checks.
  • Doing that surfaced something in the state’s own document: NC-30 publishes two methods for the same paycheck, and they disagree on 12 of those 23,760 cells by one dollar — the published per-period deduction ($245.19 weekly) is a rounded version of $12,750 ÷ 52. It is recorded on the corrections page, with the arithmetic, as an official conflict rather than anyone’s mistake.

August 7, 2026 — Georgia joins the states that match the agency

  • Georgia’s official percentage method is now implemented from the state’s own Employer’s Tax Guide (revised June 2026), including the 4.99% rate that applies to payrolls on or after May 11, 2026. Both worked examples in the guide are reproduced to the cent, and the build refuses to publish if either drifts.
  • That makes eight jurisdictions whose withholding we compute the way the agency documents it: New York, New York City, Yonkers, Utah, New Jersey, California, Wisconsin and Georgia — 50 of the 64 published examples in our corpus.

August 7, 2026 — the source watch becomes public

  • Every official URL our specifications cite is now re-fetched automatically and compared with the text we read by hand. The reliability page publishes the real counts, including the sources we cannot reach: several state agencies refuse requests from datacenter addresses, so those are re-read manually and said so plainly.
  • Each calculator page now carries the date its own sources were last re-checked, under the paycheck. Where a state’s agency blocks automated checks, the page says that instead of implying a check happened.
  • Federal Social Security wage base re-verified in a second official primary source, IRS Publication 15 for 2026: $184,500. Washington’s 2026 Paid Leave premium (1.13%, employee share 71.43%, capped at the Social Security base) and WA Cares (0.58%, no cap) re-read in the state’s own employer toolkit dated June 2026.
  • Massachusetts PFML and Colorado FAMLI moved off secondary sources: both rates re-read on the agencies’ own pages (0.88% total in each state; up to 0.46% withheld from a Massachusetts employee, 0.44% in Colorado). New Jersey’s 2026 taxable wage bases ($44,800 and $171,100) confirmed in the state labor department’s own announcement.
  • A correction of wording, not of arithmetic: for Massachusetts, Colorado and Washington, the published percentage is the most an employer may withhold — employers are allowed to absorb part or all of it. Those three pages now say so. The calculator still assumes the full employee share, which is the common case.
  • Arizona’s 2.5% rate and Pennsylvania’s 0.07% unemployment contribution could not be re-verified today: one agency serves only a JavaScript shell to our servers, the other moved the page. Both stay marked as secondary sources rather than quietly promoted.

August 7, 2026 — reproducing the agencies’ own worked examples

  • Seven jurisdictions now compute withholding with the state’s official published method, and the build refuses to publish unless our figures reproduce every worked example the agency prints: New York (8), New York City (8), Yonkers (11), Utah (6), New Jersey (6), California (6) and Wisconsin (3) — 48 of the 64 published examples in our corpus.
  • Three of those land one cent from the agency’s printed figure, where the official derivation rounds mid-way. Each is declared as such rather than smoothed over; every other example must match to the cent, and a one-cent drift now blocks a release.
  • California: Method B, the Exact Calculation method, read from the 2026 schedules — low income exemption, estimated deduction, standard deduction, exemption allowance credit and the rate tables, including the annualized variant the agency documents. The two Method A wage-bracket examples are out of scope and listed as such.
  • Wisconsin: the alternate withholding method of Publication W-166. Its withholding rate schedule (3.54%, then 4.65%) is not the 2026 tax-year schedule (3.50%, then 4.40%) — a gap inside the state’s own documents, and one reason withholding never lands exactly on liability.

August 6, 2026 — launch

  • Calceva goes live with 27 calculators: 26 states and D.C. pages plus a dedicated New York City page, and the hours-to-decimal payroll tool.
  • Federal 2026 parameters verified against the IRS revenue procedure: brackets, standard deductions, Social Security wage base, Medicare rates and thresholds.
  • State coverage wave 3 verified: Texas and Florida (constitutional no-income-tax, employer-only unemployment funding), New York (2026 rate cut per Chapter 59 of the Laws of 2025, NYC resident brackets, Yonkers surcharge, Paid Family Leave 0.432% with its $411.91 cap, disability insurance), California (latest published FTB schedules, SDI at 1.3% with no wage cap, the renamed Behavioral Health Services Tax folded into the top brackets).
  • External checks recorded for New Jersey and Oregon against three public calculators; divergences documented on the methodology page.

August 5, 2026 — pre-launch verification waves

  • Wave 2: fifteen states verified at the source, catching several changes secondary sources still had wrong — Georgia's retroactive 4.99% cut (HB 463), Missouri's top rate at 4.7% (not the widely repeated 4.95%), North Carolina's $12,750 standard deduction (not $13,000), Ohio's move to a 2.75% flat tax, Minnesota's new 0.44% Paid Leave employee premium with its own $185,000 cap.
  • Wave 1: federal plus seven initial targets verified, including South Carolina's retroactive two-rate reform (H.4216) with its income-adjusted deduction phase-down, and Washington's employee-paid PFML and WA Cares premiums.
  • Independent cross-checks: Illinois within 0.09% of SmartAsset, FICA to the dollar; Massachusetts and Colorado divergences traced to competitors omitting PFML and FAMLI employee premiums.

Current verification dates by page

Next scheduled re-verifications are listed on the methodology page, watch-list section.