Washington Paycheck Deductions Explained: PFML & WA

Washington Paycheck Deductions Explained: What PFML and WA Cares Actually Take

When I moved a piece of my freelance work to a client in Seattle last year, the first thing I told myself was simple: Washington has no state income tax, so the paycheck should feel bigger. I'd worked payroll files during my articleship and later at Zahid Jameel & Co., so I figured I already knew the math. I didn't, not fully, and building this calculator this month made me go back and check every assumption by hand.

Here's what I actually did before publishing it. I picked six pay scenarios (hourly with no overtime, hourly with 8 overtime hours, salaried single, salaried married filing jointly, one with 401(k) contributions, and one with the new overtime tax exemption applied) and worked each one out on paper first. Then I ran the same numbers through the tool. If the two didn't match to the cent, I went back into the code and found the bug. Three of the six didn't match on the first pass. That's the part nobody puts in a "how to use this calculator" post, so I figured it was worth writing down.

The scenario that broke my first assumption

Take a $28/hour worker, 40 hours a week, paid bi-weekly, single filer, no deductions. Gross pay for the period is $2,240. If you stopped at "no state income tax," you'd expect this person to keep close to $2,000 of that.

They don't. Once federal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare come out, plus Washington's own PFML and WA Cares premiums, net pay lands around $1,847. That's roughly 82% of gross, which is close to what a lot of moderate-tax states produce once you strip out their income tax bracket and add their own state-specific deductions instead. Washington just swapped one line item for two smaller ones.

The two deductions that don't show up if you just Google "Washington income tax"

I want to be specific here because I've seen enough blog posts wave at these without giving the actual math.

Washington Paid Family & Medical Leave (PFML). The total premium for 2026 is 1.13% of gross wages. You don't pay all of it. The split is 71.43% employee, 28.57% employer, so on that $2,240 gross paycheck, the employee share works out to about $18.06 for the period. It's capped at the Social Security wage base ($184,500 for 2026), so once your year-to-date wages cross that, it stops.

WA Cares Fund. This one is flat, 0.58% of every dollar earned, no cap. On the same $2,240 paycheck, that's about $13 a period. Small on its own, but it never goes away, not even for high earners, which is different from Social Security.

Neither of these has anything to do with income tax. They're payroll insurance premiums, closer in spirit to unemployment insurance than to a state tax bracket. That's exactly why they get missed. People search "does Washington have income tax," get a correct "no," and stop reading right there.

Where the calculator actually earned its keep: overtime

The scenario that took me the longest to get right was the overtime one. Under the federal rule that applies from 2025 through 2028, part of the overtime premium (the extra half-time on hours worked past 40 in a week) can be excluded from federal taxable income, up to $12,500 a year for a single filer or $25,000 for married filing jointly. It only touches federal income tax. FICA and any state or local tax still apply to the full amount.

I tested this against a worker doing 45 hours a week at $28/hour, single filer. Regular pay for 40 hours is $1,120 for the week. The 5 overtime hours pay 1.5x, so $210, and $70 of that is the "premium" portion (the extra 0.5x) that qualifies for the exemption. Small dollar amount per week, but it compounds over a full year of consistent overtime, and I wanted to see it reflected on a single paystub rather than just an annual estimate, because that's how people actually check their pay.

What I'd tell someone before they run their own numbers

Filing status changes the outcome more than people expect, even with no state tax in the picture, because it moves your federal standard deduction and bracket thresholds. Pre-tax deductions (401k, HSA, health premiums) come out before any of this math even starts, so they lower your taxable wages for federal purposes too, not just your take-home cash. And if you're hourly with a variable schedule, your per-paycheck deductions for PFML and WA Cares will move with your gross pay each period since both are percentage-based, not flat.

If you want to see your own gross pay worked out first, especially with overtime mixed in, I built a separate Gross Pay Calculator for exactly that step before you get into taxes.

Try it with your own numbers

I put the calculator together so you don't have to redo the arithmetic I just walked through. Enter your hourly rate or salary, your filing status, and any pre-tax deductions, and it builds a live paystub: gross pay, federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, WA PFML, WA Cares, and net pay, updating as you type. It also works for the other 49 states if you switch the dropdown, since the underlying tax engine isn't Washington-specific.

Try the Washington Paycheck Calculator

If you're weighing a move rather than just checking your current pay, the state swap alone isn't the whole story either. I wrote a separate Remote Work Out of State Tax Calculator after realizing my own numbers changed for three separate reasons at once (state tax, a possible geographic pay adjustment, and a shifted federal bracket), not just the one most people think about.