Why this exists

Almost nobody can answer, off the top of their head, whether $145,000 in Maryland beats $162,000 in Texas. The answer hides in four places at once, and none of them are the salary.

I built this because I kept running the same spreadsheet. Every time a recruiter emailed, I'd rebuild the same grid of brackets and premiums and match formulas, get a number, then lose the file. The comparison that actually matters — what lands in your account, in a month, after everything — takes twenty minutes to do properly and about four seconds to get wrong.

The existing tools didn't help. Most paycheck calculators handle exactly one job, and most of them exist to collect your email and hand it to a financial advisor. None of them let you put two offers side by side, which is the only question anyone with an offer letter is actually asking.

What it accounts for

Four things routinely swamp a salary difference, and people underweight all of them:

• Where you'll be taxed. State income tax varies from nothing to over 13%, and county or city tax can add several points more on top. Maryland alone swings nearly a full point between counties.
• The employer match. A 50%-up-to-6% match and a dollar-for-dollar-up-to-4% match get mentally rounded to "both have a 401(k)." They're thousands of dollars apart.
• Health premiums. A $180 monthly difference is about $2,200 a year in pre-tax dollars, and it routinely erases a $3,000 raise.
• The commute. Gas and upkeep are real money. The hours are not money, but they're not nothing either, so they're shown separately rather than folded in.

Where the numbers come from

Federal brackets, the standard deduction, the Social Security wage base, and the 401(k) deferral limit are the current published figures for the tax year shown in the tool.

State brackets, standard deductions, and personal exemptions for all fifty states and the District of Columbia come from the Tax Foundation's annual state income tax rates and brackets tables, cross-checked against state revenue department notices. Maryland's county rates come from the state's own published schedule rather than a third-party calculator, because the secondary sources disagreed with each other and most of them were wrong.

These get reviewed each January, when most rate changes take effect.

What it deliberately doesn't do

It doesn't use a cost-of-living index. Those numbers are mushy and would make the output feel invented. If housing changes, you type in the two real numbers you're actually looking at.

It doesn't itemize, model credits beyond the standard personal exemption, or handle equity compensation, self-employment income, or multi-state filing. It assumes one job, one state, one household.

It doesn't try to tell you which job to take. Money is one input among several, and it's frequently not the deciding one.

What it costs

Nothing, and there's no account to make. Your numbers never leave your browser — see the privacy page for exactly what that means and how to verify it.

Found a rate that's wrong, or a state that behaves oddly? Tell me. Corrections are the fastest way this gets better.