I verified 51 sets of US tax rules by hand and turned them into a static site
Run the same salary through three different paycheck calculators and you'll get three different answers. None of them explain why. That bothered me enough to spend three weeks building an alternative. The result is payculate.org — a paycheck calculator for all 50 US states and DC where every deduction line opens up and shows its own arithmetic . The interesting problem wasn't the code The tax…
After verifying 51 individual sets of US tax rules by hand, a reporter built a static website called payculate.org to calculate paychecks for each of the 50 states and Washington D.C. The site displays every deduction line in detail, showing the arithmetic behind it. While the tax math itself is straightforward, the real challenge was handling the many state-specific rules.
For example, Wisconsin has a decreasing standard deduction, Alabama allows deducting federal income tax before calculating state tax, Utah offers a credit that phases out with income, and Ohio has a low flat tax rate after the first $26,050. Many national calculators miss important details, such as state payroll premiums like Washington's Paid Family & Medical Leave or California's newly uncapped SDI.
The site uses simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with a Python generator holding all the tax data. It runs entirely in the browser, ensuring privacy and cost-effectiveness. The reporter defended the accuracy of the calculations through independent verification, and notes that maintaining the site is an ongoing task due to frequent rate changes.
The website has been live for three weeks, indexed by search engines and appearing in around 25 queries per month, but still lacks the authority that comes with official recognition.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
