Authors

Jessica Martinez

Contributing Writer, Business & Finance

Jessica writes the paycheck and payroll guides here: gross versus net pay, federal withholding, FICA, pay-stub literacy, and salary-to-hourly conversion. She spent six years reading loan files as a credit analyst before switching to writing full time, which is why she still checks a stated rate against its source table rather than taking a number at face value.

On this site her byline runs on Gross Pay vs Net Pay, How Much Federal Tax Is Taken Out of My Paycheck?, How to Read a Pay Stub, What Is FICA?, What Is Taken Out of My Paycheck?, Salary to Hourly (and Back), 2026 Take-Home Pay by Salary, and the Paycheck Guide. She also covers loan and debt math for LoanCalcTools, a sibling site under the same review process.

Before a page of hers publishes: every dollar figure in a worked example is recomputed by hand from the raw rate, not copied from the previous draft. Any constant that resets each year (the Social Security wage base, the standard deduction, a tax bracket threshold) is traced to the specific IRS revenue procedure or SSA release that set it and dated to that release, not to a news summary of it. When a bracket or wage base changes for a new tax year, every page that cites the old figure gets a pass before the new year's guide goes up, so the two years never contradict each other on the same site. Those three checks, the hand recompute, the dated primary source, the cross-year pass, are what Chris Terry (below) confirms before a draft publishes, and again any time the IRS or SSA puts out a new release.

Chris Terry

Owner and Editor, Encore Promotional Products

Chris runs PaystubTools and its sibling calculator sites under Encore Promotional Products. He wrote the calculators, keeps the editorial standards page current with the sourcing rule the site follows, and personally signs off on every payroll constant before it goes live.

What he checks: that the FICA rate, the Social Security wage base, the standard deduction, and the tax brackets used anywhere on the site match the current-year IRS and SSA releases rather than a prior year's figures left over from a template, that the paycheck math itself (gross minus pre-tax deductions minus withholding equals net) is the same arithmetic a payroll system would run, and that a reader-reported error gets corrected and dated the same week it comes in, not queued indefinitely. He also answers the contact form directly.