About Wage Sums

Wage Sums is a set of free calculators for the pay questions that come up at work: what overtime is worth, what the new overtime deduction saves, what an hourly rate is as a salary and a salary as an hourly rate, what a raise means per paycheck, and what a commission comes to. Each one is built on the actual rule, cites it, and shows the arithmetic rather than asking you to trust a number.

Where the numbers come from

Overtime follows the Fair Labor Standards Act: one and a half times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek for non-exempt employees, with California's daily 8-hour, 12-hour and seventh-day rules and the daily 8-hour rule used in Alaska, Nevada and Colorado modelled as options. The no-tax-on-overtime deduction is the federal deduction for qualified overtime compensation enacted in 2025 for tax years 2025 through 2028: the premium half of time-and-a-half, capped at $12,500 ($25,000 married filing jointly) and phased out above $150,000 ($300,000) of modified adjusted gross income, with 2025 federal brackets and standard deductions for the tax-saved estimate. Pay-period conversions use 52 weeks, 26 biweekly and 24 semimonthly paychecks, and 2,080 hours in a 40-hour year. Commission structures are the standard flat, marginal-tier, retroactive-tier and real-estate split conventions.

What this site doesn't do

It doesn't store what you enter, require an account, or give tax, payroll or legal advice. Whether you are exempt from overtime depends on your duties and salary, not on this page. State rules go beyond the federal floor in ways a calculator cannot fully model. The overtime deduction interacts with the rest of your return, and your employer's W-2 reporting determines what you can claim. Use the numbers to understand a paystub or an offer, then confirm with payroll or a tax professional.

Corrections

If you are a payroll professional, employment lawyer or tax adviser and a rule, threshold or bracket here is out of date, email hello@wagesums.com. Sources are named on each page so a correction can be checked against them.