Who writes these guides
The guides on this blog are written by Maeve Orenboz, a tax and payroll consultant, together with the team that builds Paystub Form. She reads and signs off every guide before it is published and when its figures are updated.
Nothing here is personal tax, legal or financial advice. What these guides are for is reading the primary sources carefully and explaining what they say in plain English, with a link so you can check us.
How a guide gets written
Every number in an article — a tax rate, a wage base, a withholding threshold, a filing deadline, a state pay stub rule — is taken from the agency that sets it, not from another blog. Where an article describes an employer's payroll portal, the steps are checked against that employer's own current help pages, because those screens change without notice.
Anything that depends on a rate carries the tax year it applies to in the text, and those articles are reviewed each January when the IRS and the Social Security Administration publish the new figures. Every article shows the date it was last updated.
Where a question has a real answer that depends on your situation, we say so rather than guessing on your behalf, and point you to the agency or the professional who can answer it.
The sources we use
These are the primary sources behind the figures on this site. Each link goes to the agency's own page, so you can confirm anything you read here at the source.
- IRS — Publication 15 (Circular E) and Publication 15-T — Federal income tax withholding, Social Security and Medicare rates, Additional Medicare Tax thresholds, and what an employer is required to withhold and report.
- IRS — annual inflation adjustments — Tax brackets, the standard deduction and the contribution limits that change each January.
- Social Security Administration — The Social Security taxable wage base and the annual cost-of-living adjustment.
- U.S. Department of Labor — Wage and Hour Division — Federal minimum wage and overtime rules, FLSA recordkeeping requirements, and the state payday-frequency tables.
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Consumer-facing guidance on proof of income, paycheck advances and payroll cards.
- State labor and revenue departments — State income tax withholding, pay stub delivery requirements, and state payroll programs such as California SDI, New Jersey FLI and Hawaii TDI.
- Employer payroll portals' own documentation — The step-by-step portal guides (Walmart, Sam's Club, Dollar General and others). Screens change often, so these are re-checked against the employer's current help pages rather than reproduced from memory.
Corrections
If you find something on this site that is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it. Email support@paystubform.com or use the contact form. When a correction changes the substance of an article, we update the article and move its last-updated date rather than quietly editing it.
What we do not publish
We do not publish sponsored articles, paid links, or reviews written in exchange for anything. We do not present customer numbers, ratings or testimonials we cannot substantiate. And we do not use these guides to claim a pay stub from this site is something it is not: Paystub Form is a document-preparation tool, and a stub you create here documents pay that you enter — see our Terms of Service for the uses we prohibit.