Paycheck math is the entire reason this site exists, so this page walks through exactly what happens to a wage figure you type into a calculator, plus the routine traffic data that comes from simply loading a page here.
Every calculator on PaystubTools, the paycheck, take-home pay, net pay, salary, overtime, and pay-raise tools, runs entirely in JavaScript inside your own browser tab. When you type a gross wage, a pay frequency, a filing status, or a state tax rate into a field, that number is used once, locally, to compute a result on your screen. Your pay figures are never sent to a PaystubTools server, because these tools have no server-side calculation step: the math runs client-side and there is no save, submit, or account feature that would give us a reason to transmit what you typed. Refreshing the page or closing the tab clears whatever you entered. Nobody at PaystubTools ever sees an individual visitor's wage, salary, or withholding numbers.
Like almost any website, we keep ordinary server and analytics logs: which page loaded, a rough location inferred from your IP address, browser and device type, and whatever site sent you here. None of that overlaps with the wage, rate, or filing-status numbers you type into a calculator, since those never leave your browser to begin with. We look at the logs to see which tools get used and to catch a page that has gone slow or broken.
Two services set cookies here: Google Analytics and Google AdSense. Analytics reports back in aggregate only, telling us how many people ran the take-home pay calculator this month without identifying any one of them. AdSense may use its own cookies to target ads from your browsing history across other sites; turn that off in your Google account settings or through the banner on this page, or block cookies in your browser entirely if you prefer. None of the calculators need a cookie to produce a result, so rejecting cookies changes nothing about how they work.
Messages sent through the contact form pass through a third-party processor, Web3Forms, before they reach us. Whatever you type there, your name, your email, and the message itself, exists only so we can write back. Nobody here puts a contact-form sender on a mailing list, and nothing you send is sold or handed to another company.
A handful of the outbound links on calculator and guide pages are affiliate links, Amazon Associates included. Buy something after clicking one and we may collect a commission, at no added cost on your end. That click can drop a tracking cookie on the destination site, which then answers to its own privacy policy, not this one. Google AdSense serves the display ads here; see Google's advertising policies for how it uses data across every site that runs its ads.
This site is built for adults running their own paycheck numbers or planning a household budget, not children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13, and if we learn that we have, we delete it.
A new analytics tool, a new ad partner, or a new form processor would each be reason enough to revise this page, and when that happens the "last updated" date at the top moves with it. There is no email announcement for a policy change, since the only inbox addresses we hold are from people who have written in through the contact form.