Methodology and sources

This page explains openly how our calculators work, which sources they use, what they deliberately do not cover and how we test them.

Tax year

All salary calculators use the rules for the calendar year 2026. We last checked the values on 4 November 2026. At that time only a draft of the 2027 wage tax program was available; we do not use drafts. Each tax year has its own module in the source code so that new values can be added cleanly.

Wage tax, solidarity surcharge, church tax

Every year the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) publishes a program flowchart (Programmablaufplan, PAP) for calculating wage tax by computer. For 2026 this is the PAP from the BMF letter of 12 November 2025 (IV C 5 - S 2361/00025/016/028). It contains the 2026 tax scale, the employee lump sum, the insurance provision, the rules for all six tax classes and the solidarity surcharge.

We implement the PAP with the open-source library lohnsteuerrechner (version 1.0.7, MIT licence). It uses decimal arithmetic and gives results to the cent. The version is pinned; we only adopt updates after testing them again.

Church tax is calculated at 8% (Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg) or 9% (other states) on the base the PAP returns with child allowances taken into account, rounded down to full cents. Church tax caps and minimum amounts of individual churches are not covered.

Social security

Contributions are calculated separately from tax with the 2026 values:

Sources: Social Insurance Reference Values Ordinance 2026 of 24 November 2025 (BGBl. 2025 I No. 278), announcement of the average additional contribution rate 2026 (BAnz AT 10.11.2025 B7), Social Code Book XI on long-term care insurance. Since 2025 the ceilings are the same throughout Germany.

Rounding: each employee share is calculated from the assessment base and the rate and rounded commercially to full cents. Health insurance and additional contribution, and care contribution and surcharge, are each rounded as one rate. Depending on the payroll software this can cause differences of one cent.

Children: child allowances (tax) and children for care insurance are separate inputs. The surcharge for the childless applies if no children are entered and the person turns at least 23 in 2026. Reductions apply for the second to fifth child while under 25; older children come first in the birth order.

Other reference values

• Minijob limit 2026: €603 a month (from 2027: €633); transition zone €603.01 to €2,000, factor F 0.6619
• Statutory minimum wage: €13.90 from 1 January 2026, €14.60 from 1 January 2027 (Fifth Minimum Wage Adjustment Ordinance)
• Weeks per month for hourly wage and part-time: 52 ÷ 12 = 13 ÷ 3 ≈ 4.333
• Working hours calculator: §§ 3, 4 and 5 of the Working Hours Act

Deliberately not covered

To avoid results that look precise but are wrong, the salary calculators refuse the following cases with an explanation, or point them out clearly: private health insurance, tax class IV with factor, registered allowances, one-off payments and bonuses, salary conversion, occupational pensions, apprentices in the transition zone and employees at or above the standard retirement age. Minijobs up to €603 have their own calculator. Every other calculator lists its limits right below the result.

Transition zone (Midijob)

Between €603.01 and €2,000 a month we calculate social contributions under § 20 (2a) SGB IV with factor F 0.6619 for 2026. The total contribution per branch is derived from the contributory income BE_total (half the rate, rounded, doubled), the employee share from BE_employee; the rest falls to the employer. The surcharge for the childless and child reductions only affect the employee share. Wage tax is unaffected. We had no official worked example for 2026; our results join the normal contributions seamlessly at €2,000 and match published examples. Whether health insurers round the assessment bases before calculating contributions is not fully settled; differences are a matter of cents.

Working students and company cars

For working students we only calculate pension insurance and do not include health, care and unemployment insurance in the wage tax insurance provision (BMF letter of 14 August 2025). For company cars we add the taxable benefit to taxable pay and deduct it from net pay after the calculation. The list price reduced under § 6 (1) No. 4 EStG is rounded down to full €100.

Other calculators

The commuter allowance, trade tax and VAT calculators follow the statutes linked on each page. Values that change often or depend on the provider (PayPal fees, fuel prices, municipal multipliers, health insurers’ levy rates and notary guide values) are stated with source and date and can be changed in the calculator.

About the English version

The English pages use exactly the same calculation engine as the German ones. Numbers are shown in English format (€2,605.50); in input fields you can type either 2605.50 or the German 2.605,50. We keep the key German terms in brackets because they are what you will see on payslips, tax assessments and forms.

How we test

• 207 test vectors from the official BMF wage tax interface for 2026 (all tax classes and pay periods) are reproduced to the cent.
• The check table in the 2026 program flowchart (annual pay €30,000, tax class I, general and special table) is matched exactly.
• 7,260 further cases are compared with a second implementation generated independently from the official BMF pseudocode (LstGen). This revealed a rounding bug in that generator’s Python output, not in our calculation; after fixing it, all cases match.
• Social security contributions, contribution ceilings, the Saxony rule, the surcharge for the childless and the child reductions are tested against cases worked out by hand.
• The net-to-gross reverse calculation is tested in round trips: the result always reaches the target net pay with the lowest gross pay needed.
• Edge cases such as Minijobs, private health insurance and the standard retirement age are refused rather than calculated wrongly.

What we have not checked: a comparison with real payslips and a professional review by a tax adviser or payroll accountant. The calculators are not officially certified.

Privacy when calculating

All calculations run in your browser. The pages load no external scripts, set no cookies and send your inputs to no server. A technical security policy (Content Security Policy) also forbids the browser from sending data from this site to other addresses.

Licences

Libraries and fonts used: lohnsteuerrechner 1.0.7 (MIT), decimal.js 10.6.0 (MIT), Fira Sans (SIL Open Font License 1.1). The full licence texts are in the licence file.

Found a mistake?

If a result differs from your payslip and you cannot find the reason in the limits above, write to us via the contact page. Please state your inputs, but no personal data such as names or tax IDs.