Sei Won Lee
Chef and restaurant owner, 25 years in food service, based in Philadelphia. I write everything on this site and I check every tax figure against its primary source before it ships.
Why a chef is writing about paychecks
Because I have been on both sides of one for twenty-five years.
I started in kitchens and ended up owning the restaurant, which means I did not learn payroll from a textbook. I learned it because it was my signature on the checks. Every two weeks I saw exactly what came out before anyone got paid: federal withholding, Social Security, Medicare, the Pennsylvania flat rate, and in Philadelphia the city wage tax on top of all of it. I have had the conversation where someone tells me their offer was $22 an hour and asks why the check says something else. That conversation is the reason this site exists.
Most wage calculators online stop at gross pay, which is the number almost nobody actually receives. I wanted a site that shows what lands in the account, with the arithmetic visible so you can check it yourself instead of taking my word for it.
What twenty-five years actually taught me
- Labor cost is the number that decides everything. Reading a P&L line by line every month for two decades teaches you faster than any course what a percentage point really costs.
- Gross pay is a headline; net pay is the fact. Nobody budgets with gross. I watched staff plan around a number that was never going to arrive.
- The hourly-to-annual math is easy. The tax that follows is where people get lost. That gap is the whole reason for the take-home breakdown on every wage page here.
- Local tax is invisible until it isn't. Philadelphia's wage tax does not appear in any national calculator, and it changes the answer for everyone working here.
How the numbers on this site are produced
Every tax figure comes from a primary source and is cited on the page where it is used:
- Federal brackets and the standard deduction come from the IRS revenue procedure for that tax year (2026 figures: Rev. Proc. 2025-32).
- The Social Security wage base comes from the Social Security Administration's annual announcement.
- Wage comparisons come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program.
Calculations are implemented in code and cross-checked against a hand calculation before release. Where a figure changes annually, the page states which tax year it applies to.
What I am not
I am not a CPA, an enrolled agent, or a licensed financial advisor, and nothing here is personalized tax or investment advice. My experience is operational — running payroll, reading statements, and preparing records for an accountant every January — not professional tax practice. The calculators are estimates built on clearly stated assumptions, and they exclude things only your own return can settle: state and local income tax, credits, itemized deductions, and payroll deductions specific to your employer. For anything that affects a filing or a real financial decision, talk to a licensed professional.
Corrections
If you find a number on this site that is wrong, I want to know. Email [email protected] and I will check it against the source and fix it. Corrections are made on the page itself rather than quietly.