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WageKeep — Real Income Calculators
Real take-home math for freelancers and job offers
11 followers
Real take-home math for freelancers and job offers
11 followers
WageKeep is a pair of free calculators that answer the question every quick mental estimate gets wrong: what do I actually take home? Compare a 1099 contract against a W-2 salary using real 2026 federal tax brackets, or find the exact hourly rate you need to charge to hit your income goal with self-employment tax, health insurance, and the QBI deduction included, not skipped.
Hello! I made this after noticing every "take-home pay calculator" I could find either ignored self-employment tax completely or made you do the bracket math yourself. Both tools here run the real 2026 numbers with progressive federal brackets, FICA/SE tax, the QBI deduction, so the number you see is the number you'd actually get. Everything runs in your browser; nothing you type gets sent anywhere or stored. Would love feedback, especially from freelancers/contractors on whether the rate calculator's assumptions (weeks billed, overhead) match your real experience.
How do you handle state taxes since they vary so much, and does the freelancer calculator let you save or compare different scenarios side by side?
@glersamurmxp9 These are both good questions.
State taxes: the calculators are federal-only right now, on purpose. State income tax ranges from zero (Texas, Florida, a handful of others) to double digits with completely different bracket structures, and getting that right for 50 states is a much bigger lift than the federal math was. The real limitation this creates: your take-home will be lower than what's shown here if your state taxes income. It's the biggest disclosed gap on the site currently, and something worth tackling eventually, state by state rather than all at once.
Saving or comparing scenarios: not yet. Right now it's one live scenario at a time, no save or side-by-side view. That's a smaller, more contained build than state taxes though, and a genuinely good idea. Going to look at adding it.
Does the calculator stay up to date if the tax brackets change mid-year, or will I need to wait for the next update before I can trust the numbers again?
@orhansoykapwbr That's a good question. Federal tax brackets and the standard deduction get set once a year, the IRS announces them in the fall for the following year, so they don't actually change mid-year. That part holds steady all year once it's set.
The limitation is the other direction: the calculator doesn't pull live data from anywhere. It's real 2026 figures I checked and built in by hand. When 2027 numbers come out, I'll need to manually update the site as it won't catch that on its own, and I don't have that automated yet.
Appreciate you asking this directly. It's actually made me want to add a visible "figures current as of" date right on the page, so nobody has to wonder or dig into the methodology section to check. Might build that this week.
Does this pull the state tax info from anywhere live or do I need to manually enter my state's rates each time?
@kkuruscu9317 Right now, neither as there's no state tax handling at all, live or manual. The calculators are federal-only. If your state taxes income, your actual take-home will be lower than what's shown here.
Full state-by-state tax brackets would be a genuinely big build, 50 states, some flat, some progressive, a few with zero income tax, a couple of cities with their own tax on top of that.
But there's a smaller version worth doing soon: an optional field where you enter your own state's flat rate, and it just applies that on top of the federal number. Not as precise as real bracket math, but far better than nothing, and a much more realistic near-term add than full 50-state coverage.
Finally someone includes the QBI deduction in these calculators. Plugged in my numbers and the freelance rate I actually need was about 18% higher than my back-of-the-napkin guess.
@bedirhan19697 Really glad it was useful! That 18% gap is exactly the kind of thing I built this to catch. Appreciate you plugging in real numbers and sharing the result, genuinely useful for me to hear too.
Finally a calculator that doesn't skip self-employment tax and QBI — ran my 1099 against a W-2 offer and the gap was way bigger than my napkin math suggested. Super useful.
@rojin9196 Appreciate you actually running your own numbers through it rather than taking my word for it :)
love that the QBI deduction and self-employment tax actually make it into the freelancer calculator instead of getting hand-waved away. that is the stuff most "take home pay" tools quietly skip.
@muammerbozada Glad you like it! That was actually the whole reason I built it instead of just using an existing calculator, every one I found did exactly that, hand-waved the tax math away.