Payroll Tax (FICA) Calculator
Tax & IncomeSocial Security and Medicare on your wages.
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FICA rates · 2025
| Tax | Employee | Combined | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Security | 6.2% | 12.4% | Wages up to $176,100 |
| Medicare | 1.45% | 2.9% | All wages |
| Additional Medicare | 0.9% | — | Over $200,000 |
Your inputs
| Employment type | Employee (W-2) |
|---|---|
| Annual W-2 wages | $0 |
| Filing status | Single |
| Tax year | 2025 |
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- United States unless the calculator explicitly says otherwise
- Rules and time period
- Tax years supported by the selected calculator
- Scope and limitations
- Educational estimate only, not a tax return or filing determination. U.S. statutory-threshold tools use USD. Confirm current law and your facts with the relevant authority or a qualified tax professional.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Choose your employment type — employee, self-employed, or both. An employee splits FICA with an employer; the self-employed pay both halves as self-employment tax; 'both' coordinates the two.
- 02
Enter your annual W-2 wages and, if you are self-employed, your net self-employment income (your Schedule C profit). The calculator applies the 92.35% adjustment to the self-employment portion for you.
- 03
Set your filing status, which fixes the Additional Medicare threshold, and the tax year, which sets the Social Security wage base. Open Advanced options to pick a pay frequency.
- 04
Read your Social Security, Medicare and Additional Medicare taxes, the employee and employer shares, the combined total reaching the system, and your effective FICA rate.
- 05
Check the per-pay-period table, the taxable-wage breakdown and the earnings-versus-FICA comparison, then save scenarios to compare an employee year against a freelance one.
Formula
Payroll tax has three pieces, each on its own base. Social Security is 6.2% of your wages up to the annual wage base — min(wages, base) × 6.2% — and your employer matches it, for 12.4% in total. Above the base, no more Social Security is due. Medicare is 1.45% of all your wages, with no ceiling, matched by your employer for 2.9% combined. The Additional Medicare Tax is 0.9% on wages above a filing-status threshold ($200,000 single and head of household, $250,000 married filing jointly, $125,000 married filing separately). It is employee-only — the employer does not match it. Your employee FICA is Social Security + Medicare + any Additional Medicare. Your employer pays Social Security + Medicare again, and the combined figure is what actually reaches the system. For self-employment you are both employer and employee, so the rates double from the start — but first your net earnings are multiplied by 0.9235, which removes the share an employer would have paid. Self-employment tax = (net × 0.9235) × 12.4% for Social Security, capped by the same wage base, plus (net × 0.9235) × 2.9% for Medicare. If you also have W-2 wages, those fill the Social Security wage base first, so only the leftover base is taxed on the self-employment side. Half of the self-employment tax is deductible against income tax. The effective FICA rate is your own payroll tax divided by your total earnings: it falls once wages cross the Social Security cap, and rises toward 15% with self-employment, which carries both halves.
Example
Take a single employee earning $65,000 in 2025. Social Security is $65,000 × 6.2% = $4,030 and Medicare is $65,000 × 1.45% = $942.50, so employee FICA is $4,972.50 — a flat 7.65% — and the employer quietly matches it, sending $9,945 to the system. Now make that person a freelancer with $100,000 of net self-employment income instead. First, $100,000 × 0.9235 = $92,350. Social Security is $92,350 × 12.4% = $11,451.40 and Medicare is $92,350 × 2.9% = $2,678.15, for $14,129.55 of self-employment tax — both halves, an effective 14.1%. Half of that, about $7,065, is deductible against income tax. Finally, suppose they do both: $150,000 in wages and $120,000 of net self-employment. The wages use $150,000 of the $176,100 Social Security base, leaving only $26,100 for the self-employment side, so SE Social Security is $26,100 × 12.4% = $3,236.40 rather than the full amount — coordination that saves real money. Medicare still applies to everything, and because combined earnings cross $200,000, a 0.9% Additional Medicare surtax of $547.38 lands on the top slice. Their own payroll tax is $18,472.56, the employer adds $11,475, and the effective rate is 6.8% — lower than the plain employee, because so much of the self-employment income sits above the Social Security cap and pays only Medicare.
Definitions
- FICA
- The Federal Insurance Contributions Act — the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, withheld from wages and matched by employers.
- Social Security tax
- 6.2% of wages up to the annual wage base (12.4% counting the employer match), funding retirement, disability and survivor benefits.
- Medicare tax
- 1.45% of all wages with no cap (2.9% with the employer match), funding Medicare hospital and health coverage.
- Social Security wage base
- The yearly ceiling on wages subject to Social Security tax — $176,100 in 2025. Earnings above it pay only Medicare.
- Additional Medicare Tax
- A 0.9% surtax on wages and self-employment earnings above a filing-status threshold. Employees pay it; employers do not match it.
- Employee FICA
- The payroll tax withheld from your paycheck — your half of Social Security and Medicare, plus any Additional Medicare Tax.
- Employer FICA
- The matching Social Security and Medicare your employer pays on your wages — equal to your half, but not the 0.9% surtax.
- Combined FICA
- Employee plus employer FICA — the full amount your wages send to Social Security and Medicare.
- Self-employment tax
- The Social Security and Medicare tax the self-employed pay on net earnings — both halves, because they are their own employer.
- Net self-employment income
- Your business profit (Schedule C), the starting point for self-employment tax before the 92.35% adjustment.
- 92.35% adjustment
- Net self-employment earnings are multiplied by 0.9235 before the tax applies, mirroring the employer-half deduction a wage earner gets.
- Employment type
- Whether you are a W-2 employee, self-employed, or both — which sets the employer match, the SE tax and how they coordinate.
- Effective FICA rate
- Your own payroll tax as a share of your total earnings — below 7.65% when wages top the Social Security cap, near 15% when self-employed.
Good to know
What FICA pays for — and why it stands apart
FICA — the Federal Insurance Contributions Act — is the payroll tax that funds two of the largest programs in the country: Social Security, which pays retirement, disability and survivor benefits, and Medicare, which covers health care for older and disabled people. What sets it apart from income tax is that it is earmarked. Income tax flows into general revenue to be spent on anything; FICA is dedicated, and the contributions you and your employer make are tied to the specific benefits you can later draw. Your lifetime Social Security earnings record, built from these very payments, determines the retirement benefit you eventually receive. That contributory design is why payroll tax is structured on its own flat basis, separate from the brackets and deductions of the income-tax system, and why it deserves to be understood on its own terms. For most workers it is collected automatically from every paycheck and split cleanly into a Social Security slice and a Medicare slice. Seeing those two components separately — as this calculator does — makes plain how much of your pay supports future retirement income versus health coverage, and why the totals are larger than many people assume once the employer's matching contribution is brought into view.
The hidden half: employer matching
The most misunderstood feature of payroll tax is that you only ever see half of it. For both Social Security and Medicare, the statute divides the tax equally between worker and employer: you pay 7.65% of your wages and your employer pays another 7.65% on the same wages. Your payslip shows only your share, but the employer quietly remits an identical amount, so the real cost of your labour to the system is close to double the figure withheld from your check. This calculator deliberately surfaces both — the employee FICA you actually feel, and the combined total once the match is added. The distinction matters in two practical ways. First, it reframes how you think about your true compensation: the employer's contribution is, in effect, part of what it costs to employ you. Second, it explains the leap that catches new freelancers off guard. The moment you become self-employed, there is no employer on the other side of the ledger, and the matching half does not vanish — it lands squarely on you. Understanding the split before you make that move turns an unpleasant surprise at tax time into a planned-for cost.
The Social Security wage cap
Social Security tax is unusual among taxes in that it simply stops at a ceiling. Each year the government sets a wage base — $176,100 in 2025 — and once your earnings cross it, not another dollar of Social Security tax is withheld for the rest of the year. Medicare, by contrast, keeps applying to every dollar with no limit at all. The cap exists because Social Security benefits are themselves capped: there is a maximum monthly benefit, so the contributions that fund it are capped to match. For higher earners this produces a counter-intuitive result that the calculator makes visible — your effective payroll-tax rate actually falls as your income climbs past the base, because the large block of earnings above it carries only the 1.45% Medicare rate rather than the full 7.65%. Watching the Social Security line plateau while Medicare keeps climbing is the clearest illustration of how the cap reshapes the burden at the top. It is also why two people with very different salaries can end up paying surprisingly similar Social Security tax, and why a raise that pushes you past the base costs far less in FICA than the raise that took you up to it.
Medicare and the Additional Medicare surtax
Medicare's base tax is the simplest line in payroll: 1.45% on every dollar of wages, matched by your employer, with no cap to track. But higher earners meet a second layer. The Additional Medicare Tax adds 0.9% on wages and self-employment earnings above a threshold that depends on how you file — $200,000 for single and head-of-household filers, $250,000 for married couples filing jointly, and $125,000 for married filing separately. Two features make it distinctive. First, like an income-tax bracket, it applies only to the slice above the threshold, not to your whole income, so crossing the line does not retroactively raise the rate on everything beneath it. Second, it is genuinely employee-only: your employer matches the base 1.45% but never the 0.9% surtax, which is why adding it raises your figure while leaving the employer's unchanged. There is a wrinkle worth knowing. Employers are required to start withholding the surtax once your wages with them pass $200,000, regardless of your filing status — so a married couple may have too much or too little withheld, with the true amount settled when you file. This tool uses your filing-status threshold to estimate that final liability rather than the flat withholding figure.
Self-employment tax: being your own employer
When you work for yourself, the comfortable arithmetic of the split disappears. There is no employer to pay the matching half, so you pay both — 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare, a 15.3% combined rate that applies on top of any income tax. This is self-employment tax, reported on Schedule SE, and it is the single biggest reason a freelancer's overall tax bill outpaces an employee's at the same income. The calculation does not start from your full profit, though. First your net earnings are multiplied by 0.9235 — reduced by 7.65% — and the tax applies to that smaller figure. The adjustment is not a loophole; it is there to keep the self-employed on roughly equal footing with employees, whose own FICA is effectively computed after an employer's share has been set aside, and to reflect that an employer may deduct its half as a business expense. So a $100,000 profit is taxed on $92,350, and the Social Security portion still respects the same annual wage base, capping once your earnings reach it. The result is a payroll-tax rate near 15% rather than the employee's visible 7.65% — a gap that is really just the employer match, now paid by you.
The half-deduction that softens the blow
Paying both halves of FICA sounds punishing, and it is heavier than an employee's share, but the tax code offers a partial counterweight. You may deduct one-half of your self-employment tax as an above-the-line adjustment to income — a deduction that reduces the income on which your income tax is calculated, available whether or not you itemize. The logic mirrors the employer side of a normal job: a business gets to deduct the FICA it pays on wages, so the self-employed, acting as their own employer, are allowed to deduct the employer-equivalent half of their self-employment tax. It is important to be precise about what the deduction does and does not do. It does not reduce the self-employment tax itself — you still owe the full amount to Social Security and Medicare. It reduces your income tax, by lowering taxable income. For a freelancer in a middle bracket, that can recover a meaningful slice of the extra cost, though never all of it. This calculator reports the deductible figure so you can carry it into an income-tax estimate, but because it models payroll tax alone, it does not apply the deduction to a tax bill here.
When you're both employed and self-employed
Plenty of people earn a salary and run something on the side, and for them payroll tax is not simply the two calculations stacked on top of each other — they interact, and the order matters. The key is the Social Security wage base, which is shared across all your earnings rather than applied fresh to each. Your W-2 wages fill that base first. If your job already pays you above the base, there is no Social Security room left, so your self-employment earnings escape the 12.4% Social Security portion entirely and face only the 2.9% Medicare rate. If your wages use only part of the base, the leftover room is what gets taxed on the self-employment side. The Additional Medicare threshold works the same way: wages count toward it first, and only self-employment earnings above what remains are surtaxed. This coordination can save a moonlighter a surprising amount, and getting it wrong — taxing the full self-employment Social Security on top of fully taxed wages — is a common and expensive mistake. Choosing 'both' in this calculator applies the coordination automatically, showing exactly how much of your side income still owes Social Security and how much has already been covered by your day job.
Payroll tax across your pay periods
Annual totals are the right way to understand the system, but you experience FICA one paycheck at a time, and the rhythm differs by how often you are paid. The same yearly Social Security and Medicare burden divides into 12 monthly bites, 26 biweekly ones, or 52 weekly ones, and the per-period figure is what actually shrinks each deposit. For a steady salary the deductions look constant all year — until a high earner crosses the Social Security wage base mid-year, at which point the Social Security line abruptly disappears from later checks while Medicare carries on unchanged. That mid-year jump in take-home pay is not a payroll error; it is the cap doing its job. The self-employed feel the opposite rhythm: rather than a deduction from each check, their payroll tax accumulates as profit accrues and is paid in quarterly estimated instalments, which is why budgeting roughly 15% of each payment for self-employment tax keeps the quarterly bill from becoming a shock. The pay-period table here translates the annual figure into whichever cadence matches how you are actually paid, so the number you see lines up with the one leaving your account.
FICA versus income tax
It is worth holding firmly in mind that payroll tax and income tax are separate systems that merely arrive in the same envelope. Income tax is progressive: it rises through brackets as you earn more, it is shaped heavily by deductions and credits, and it funds the general operations of government. FICA is flat: it has no brackets and no deductions, it is dedicated to Social Security and Medicare, and it bites from the very first dollar of wages. Because the two are computed independently, your total withholding is the sum of them, and a change to one does not move the other — claiming a larger income-tax deduction, for instance, does nothing to your FICA. This separation explains several things that puzzle people. A modest earner who owes almost no income tax, thanks to the standard deduction and credits, still sees a substantial FICA line, because FICA grants no such relief. A high earner faces both the steepest income-tax brackets and the Additional Medicare surtax at once. And the self-employed must plan for income tax and a 15.3% self-employment tax as two distinct obligations. Reading them as separate lines, rather than one blurred 'tax', is the first step to understanding your paycheck.
Reading FICA on your payslip — and the surprises to watch for
Payroll tax is one of the largest deductions most workers face and one of the least examined, so learning to read it repays the effort. Social Security and Medicare usually appear as separate items, sometimes under their program names rather than the word FICA, and they are computed on your gross wages before income tax and most other deductions. A handful of patterns are worth recognising. Because Social Security stops at the wage base, a high earner will watch that line vanish partway through the year while Medicare continues — a sign you have crossed the cap, not a mistake. If you hold more than one job, each employer withholds Social Security independently and caps at the base on its own, so your combined wages can over-withhold once they exceed the base; the excess is not lost, but reclaimed as a credit when you file. Pre-tax benefits muddy the picture too: Section 125 cafeteria-plan items such as certain health premiums lower your FICA wages, while a traditional 401(k) deferral lowers income-tax wages but not FICA, so the two bases on your stub can differ. And if you move from employee to self-employed, the familiar half-share on your payslip becomes the full self-employment tax you must set aside and pay yourself. Checking these lines each pay period, rather than only at year end, helps you catch withholding errors early, understand why your take-home shifts mid-year, and plan around the cap and the surtax thresholds with confidence.
Frequently asked questions
What is FICA, and what does it pay for?
FICA — the Federal Insurance Contributions Act — is the payroll tax that funds Social Security (retirement, disability and survivor benefits) and Medicare (health coverage for older and disabled people). Unlike income tax, which goes into general revenue, FICA is earmarked for those two programs, and your contributions help determine the benefits you can later draw. It is collected from the first dollar of wages, with no brackets, deductions or credits.
Does my employer really pay the same payroll tax I do?
Yes. For Social Security and Medicare, the law splits the tax in half: you pay 7.65% and your employer pays another 7.65% on your wages. Your payslip shows only your half, but the employer remits the same amount again, so the true cost of your wages to the system is roughly double what you see withheld. The one exception is the 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax, which the employer does not match.
What is the Social Security wage base, and what happens above it?
Social Security tax only applies to wages up to an annual ceiling — the wage base, which is $176,100 in 2025 and rises most years. Once your earnings cross it, no more Social Security tax is withheld for the rest of the year, though Medicare keeps applying to every dollar. Because the base caps the tax, a very high earner's effective Social Security rate falls as income rises past it.
Who pays the Additional Medicare Tax?
It is an employee-only 0.9% surtax on wages and self-employment earnings above a filing-status threshold — $200,000 for single and head-of-household filers, $250,000 married filing jointly, $125,000 married filing separately. Only the slice above the threshold is surtaxed, much like an income-tax bracket, and the employer does not match it. The self-employed pay it too, on their net earnings above the same line.
How is self-employment tax different from employee FICA?
When no employer stands between you and the tax, you pay both halves yourself: 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare, a 15.3% combined rate on most of your earnings. That is why a freelancer's payroll-tax bill is close to double an employee's on the same income — the matching share that an employer would have paid now comes out of your own pocket as self-employment tax.
Why is self-employment income multiplied by 92.35%?
Before the tax applies, your net self-employment earnings are multiplied by 0.9235 — that is, reduced by 7.65%. The adjustment mirrors the fact that an employee's FICA is calculated on wages after the employer's half has effectively been set aside, and that an employer can deduct its share as a business expense. Multiplying by 92.35% puts the self-employed on comparable footing, so they are not taxed on the portion that stands in for the employer contribution.
I have a job and a side business — how do the two interact?
Your W-2 wages fill the Social Security wage base first. If your wages already use most of the base, only the small remainder is subject to Social Security on the self-employment side — Medicare, which has no cap, still applies to all of it. The Additional Medicare threshold is also shared across both: wages count toward it first, and self-employment earnings above what's left are surtaxed. Selecting 'both' applies this coordination automatically.
Is half of my self-employment tax really deductible?
Yes. You can deduct one-half of your self-employment tax as an above-the-line adjustment that lowers your income — not your self-employment tax itself, but the income tax calculated on top of it. It partly offsets the sting of paying both halves, and it is available whether or not you itemize. This calculator reports the deductible amount but, being payroll-only, does not apply it to an income-tax figure.
Is FICA the same as income tax?
No — they are two independent systems that happen to share a paycheck. Income tax is progressive, shaped by brackets, deductions and credits, and funds general government. FICA is flat, has no deductions, is earmarked for Social Security and Medicare, and applies from the first dollar. Because they are computed separately, even a low earner who owes little income tax still pays meaningful FICA, and the two figures should be read as distinct lines.
Why might this figure not match the FICA withheld on my paycheck?
A few reasons. Employers withhold the Additional Medicare Tax at a flat $200,000 regardless of filing status, so a married filer's paycheck withholding can differ from the true liability, which is reconciled at filing. If you hold more than one job, each employer caps Social Security independently, so your combined wages can over-withhold past the base — you reclaim the excess on your return. And pre-tax cafeteria-plan benefits can lower your FICA wages below your gross pay.
Do bonuses, tips and overtime count for FICA?
Generally yes. Bonuses, commissions, tips and overtime are all wages for Social Security and Medicare, taxed at the same rates as your base pay. Traditional 401(k) contributions do not reduce FICA wages — they lower income-tax wages only — while Section 125 cafeteria-plan benefits such as certain health premiums can. Investment income, by contrast, is outside FICA entirely (though high earners may owe a separate Net Investment Income Tax).