Michigan Paycheck Calculator.

This calculator implements IRS Publication 15-T's Worksheet 1A, the percentage method for automated payroll systems, for federal income tax withholding. It is the only IRS document that governs how an employer computes withholding for any amount of wages and any year's Form W-4; it is a different document from Revenue Procedure 2025-32, which sets the annual tax liability brackets used on a Form 1040, not the withholding brackets used on a paycheck.

Federal withholding on this page follows IRS Publication 15-T, Worksheet 1A, the percentage method for automated payroll systems. That publication is the only authority for how an employer computes withholding, so these figures are single-sourced by necessity rather than blended. We cross-checked every rate schedule against the annual tables in Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and they reconcile exactly.

Worksheet 1A annualizes your taxable wages, subtracts a W-4 Step 4(b) deduction plus a line-1g adjustment ($12,900 if married filing jointly, $8,600 otherwise, reduced to $0 if the Step 2 box is checked), and applies one of six annual rate schedules depending on filing status and whether Step 2 is checked. Single and Married Filing Separately share one schedule for withholding purposes even though they diverge on the annual return's top bracket. The result is divided by your pay frequency and reduced by your per-period Step 3 credit, then increased by any Step 4(c) extra withholding.

The $8,600 and $12,900 line-1g figures are not the standard deduction, though they are built to reconcile with it exactly: the 2026 standard deduction is $16,100 for Single and Married Filing Separately, $24,150 for Head of Household, and $32,200 for Married Filing Jointly. Add each status's line-1g figure to where its 0%-rate withholding band ends and you land exactly on where its 10%-rate band ends under Revenue Procedure 2025-32. That confirms the two documents describe the same underlying policy through two different mechanisms.

Social Security (6.2%) and the 0.9% Additional Medicare tax are both applied against your year-to-date wages, not projected forward. This calculator reads the interval overlap between your entered year-to-date wages and the $184,500 Social Security wage base, and separately against the $200,000 Additional Medicare withholding trigger, for the period you are calculating. That is the only way to get the Social Security and Additional Medicare lines right for anyone who crosses either threshold mid-year. Medicare's 1.45% has no wage cap.

Michigan withholds 4.25% of compensation after a personal and dependency exemption, per the Michigan Treasury notice of April 15, 2026. Michigan's $5,900 personal and dependency exemption is taken from Form 446 (Rev. 02-26), the state's own withholding guide, and is single-sourced from that form. We checked three other published figures while building this page and all three were out of date.

Michigan publishes an annual exemption amount of $5,900 per exemption and states that withholding is 4.25 percent of pay after the exemption allowance is deducted. It does not publish a table splitting that annual allowance across pay periods, so we divide it evenly by the number of pay periods in your year. This is the conventional payroll treatment, and it matches the formula published in the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Finance Center's Michigan withholding bulletins, but it is our arithmetic and not a figure published by Treasury. Michigan directs employers to its own withholding calculator; if your employer's figure differs from ours, that calculator is the authority, and you can check us against it here: www.michigan.gov/taxes/business-taxes/withholding/tax-calculator

Michigan's rate is not permanently fixed at 4.25%: state law requires a formulaic cut whenever general fund revenue growth outpaces inflation. For the 2026 tax year, fiscal year 2025 general fund revenue fell 1.56% against inflation of 2.70%, so the trigger was not met and the rate held at 4.25% rather than dropping further.

A Michigan employer withholds no Michigan income tax from residents of six reciprocal states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. That exemption requires the employee to have an MI-W4 on file claiming it (Form 446); residency in a reciprocal state by itself does not switch Michigan withholding off, and state reciprocity never covers a Michigan city's own income tax.

Twenty-four Michigan cities levy an income tax under Public Act 284 of 1964 (MCL 141.501 et seq.), which caps the non-resident rate at half the resident rate. For Detroit we apply the personal and dependency exemption using Treasury's own published per-period values from Form 5469, because Treasury publishes them. For the other twenty-three cities we apply the rate only. Michigan law sets a floor of $600 per exemption and lets each city set a higher figure, and no city other than Detroit publishes a current per-period table. Applying an annual figure without the publisher's own proration would understate tax for residents of several cities; applying the rate alone slightly overstates, which is the safer direction for an estimate of what lands in your account.

Form 5469 publishes per-period exemption values for weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly and per diem payrolls. It publishes none for quarterly or semiannual payrolls. For those two we divide the $600 annual exemption by four and by two, giving $150.00 and $300.00 exactly. That is our arithmetic, not Treasury's, and we say so here rather than presenting it as published. Treasury's per diem value of $1.64 is calculated on a calendar-day basis and does not multiply back to $600 across a 260-day payroll year. We use it exactly as printed, because that is what Treasury instructs an employer to use.

If you are not a Detroit resident, Detroit taxes only the portion of your pay you earn inside the city, and only when Detroit is your predominant place of employment, which Treasury defines as at least 25 percent of your compensation from that employer. Below that threshold your Detroit withholding is zero.

Pre-tax deductions reduce the base we use for city tax, in line with how we treat the federal and Michigan bases. Form 5469 says to use gross earnings and does not address pre-tax deductions; federal payroll guidance for Michigan cities nets them. We net them and tell you so. If an employee does not complete Form 5527, Treasury instructs the employer to withhold at the resident rate with no exemptions at all. That is why this calculator defaults the Detroit exemption count to zero.

All money is computed in integer cents with a single half-up rounding rule, applied exactly once per line item, matching Pub 15-T's own rounding convention. Every tax line is computed independently from its own base and summed; the total is never derived by subtracting an intermediate figure.