How to Read Your Pay Stub

Work top down, and start with the period

The first thing on the stub is the pay period, and it is worth a moment because everything else is meaningless without it. Confirm the dates cover the work you think you are being paid for, and notice the lag — most employers pay a week or two in arrears, so the period ending is not the period you just worked. That lag is normal and it becomes important the moment you are trying to work out whether a rate change was applied on the right date.

Then check the hours against your own record. Compare the total against your own record of what you actually worked, including the parts nobody records: the fifteen minutes before a shift, the working lunch, the travel between sites. If the stub says forty and your week was forty-six, that discrepancy is the whole story and nothing further down the stub will reveal it.

Next come the earnings lines, and this is where the first real error hides. If any hours were paid at an overtime rate, that rate should be one and a half times your regular rate — a weekly calculation including shift differentials, nondiscretionary bonuses and commissions — rather than one and a half times your base hourly wage. The two are different numbers whenever you earned anything beyond straight hourly pay, and payroll systems get it wrong routinely.

Trace every deduction to a reason

Deductions fall into three groups and every line should belong to one of them. Legally required: federal and state income tax withholding, Social Security and Medicare, and any court-ordered garnishment. Elected by you: health premiums, retirement contributions, union dues, voluntary insurance. And a third group covering everything else, which is where the questions live.

A deduction you cannot place in the first two groups deserves an explanation, and asking for one is an ordinary request rather than a challenge. Charges for uniforms, tools, cash register shortages, breakage or customer walkouts are frequently unlawful — particularly where they take your effective pay below the applicable minimum wage, which is the federal floor on this, and several states prohibit them outright regardless of your pay level. So the state question comes before the arithmetic.

The arithmetic that settles most of these questions is straightforward enough to do in your head. Take gross pay, subtract any deduction that primarily benefits the employer rather than you, divide by hours actually worked, and compare to the minimum wage that applies where you work. If the result is below it, the deduction has taken you under the floor, and that is not permitted whatever you may have signed.

The year-to-date column

The column almost nobody reads is the most useful one on the stub. Year-to-date figures accumulate across every period, which means an error in one period persists in the running total, and comparing the two catches things a single period conceals entirely. It is the only view on the stub that spans more than one payment.

The check itself takes about thirty seconds a period. Take last period’s year-to-date gross, add this period’s gross, and see whether it equals this period’s year-to-date. It should match exactly, to the cent. When it does not, something was adjusted between the two stubs, and an adjustment nobody mentioned is worth asking about.

The year-to-date column is also what you will need if you ever have to reconstruct what you were paid. It is the only place on a single document that summarizes the whole year, which is why keeping the final stub of each year is worth more than keeping all the others. If you keep nothing else, keep those.

The three places errors hide

The first is overtime calculated on the wrong base, described above. It is the costliest error because it repeats every week you work extra hours and the shortfall on any single stub is small enough to be invisible. Small and weekly is how these survive for years without anybody querying them.

The second is automatic deductions, particularly the meal break. Many timekeeping systems deduct thirty minutes per shift whether or not a break was taken, and in a busy operation the break frequently is not. Nobody decided to underpay anybody; a setting is applying itself, and it will keep applying itself until somebody names a specific date.

The third is effective dates. When a raise, a rate change or a benefit election takes effect mid-period, the arithmetic has to split the period, and split-period calculations are where payroll systems most often produce a plausible wrong answer. Any stub covering a change is worth a closer look than an ordinary one.

What is not on your stub

It is worth knowing what the document does not tell you, because people reason from its absence and draw the wrong conclusion about what a job is worth. Employer-paid contributions — the employer half of payroll taxes, the health premium the employer covers, any retirement match — usually do not appear at all, so the stub understates what your employment costs and what it is worth. Somebody comparing two jobs on take-home pay alone is comparing the smaller half of each package.

Accrued leave balances appear on some stubs and not others, and where they do appear they may lag the timekeeping system by a period or more, so a balance shown here is a guide rather than a definitive figure. And there is no federal requirement to provide a pay stub at all; that obligation comes from state law, which is why the format varies so much and why some workers receive nothing beyond a payment. Where your state does require one, an employer failing to provide it is a separate issue from whether the amount was right.

Keep them, and keep them somewhere that is yours

Save every stub, and save them outside any company system. People who leave a job abruptly frequently lose access to a payroll portal on the day, and that is precisely the moment the records start to matter — for a wage claim, a mortgage application, an unemployment filing or a dispute about what you were owed. All four ask for documents on a short deadline.

A folder of PDFs takes no effort to maintain and answers questions years later that nothing else can. Mortgage applications, unemployment filings and wage claims all ask for exactly this and give you little time to produce it. If your employer provides only online access, download them as they arrive rather than trusting the portal to be there when you need it.

If something looks wrong

Raise it as a specific question about a specific period rather than as a general impression. “The overtime on the period ending the 14th — how was the regular rate calculated?” gets a real answer, because it points somebody at a calculation they can rerun. “My pay looks low” does not.

Check three periods before raising it, because a single stub can look wrong for reasons that resolve on the next one — a timing difference, a retroactive adjustment, a benefit election processed late. Three periods is enough to distinguish a timing artifact from a pattern. A pattern across three periods is a question worth asking and usually gets fixed without anything formal.

This is general information about how to read the document rather than tax or legal advice about your pay. If a shortfall is significant or has run for a long time, your state labor agency can tell you what is recoverable, and they will answer a question without any obligation to file a claim.