New York is one of the few states where your city matters as much as your state. A New York City resident pays a second income tax on top of the state one, and a Yonkers resident pays a surcharge on the state tax already worked out. This New York paycheck calculator covers all three local taxes, so the figure above is the whole picture rather than a state-only estimate. Use the City field to switch between them.
How New York State withholding works
Your employer subtracts a single figure covering the standard deduction and your exemptions, $7,400 if you are single and $7,950 if married, plus $1,000 for each allowance you claimed on Form IT-2104. The state rate schedule then applies to what is left.
Those schedules are unusual, and worth understanding if you have ever looked at one and assumed it was misprinted. The marginal rates do not climb steadily. They rise, drop back, spike, then drop again. New York deliberately builds recapture into its withholding tables so that high earners lose the benefit of the lower brackets, and that jagged sequence is the mechanism doing it.
You do not need to follow the arithmetic to trust the result. In practice it means New York withholds slightly more from high earners so that fewer people face a bill at filing time.
New York City residents pay twice
The city runs its own bracket schedule with its own exemption, $5,000 single and $5,500 married, plus $1,000 per allowance, on top of everything the state takes. City rates run from 2.05% to 4.25%.
The tax follows where you live, not where you work. Live in the city and commute out and you still owe it. Live in Westchester and commute in and you do not. On an $80,000 salary claiming one allowance, the city tax comes to about $2,831 a year, so choosing the wrong one of those two is not a rounding error.
Worth knowing: the city’s top withholding rate of 4.25% is higher than its top statutory rate. That is not an error in the tables. Like the state schedules, they are built to over-withhold slightly from high earners rather than leave a bill at filing time.
Yonkers works differently again
Yonkers does not run its own brackets. Residents pay a surcharge of 16.75% of their net New York State tax, so the amount moves with the state calculation rather than with your wages directly. If your state tax falls, your Yonkers tax falls with it.
People who work in Yonkers but live elsewhere pay something else entirely: a flat earnings tax of 0.5% on the wages they earn there, with no exemption and no link to the state tax. The two are listed separately above, because treating a commuter as a resident would overstate what they owe several times over.
Disability and Paid Family Leave
Two small contributions come out of a New York paycheck that most states do not have. Both are capped, in different ways, and both are smaller than people expect.
- Disability benefits (DBL), half of one percent of wages, but never more than sixty cents a week. That is $31.20 a year at most, whatever you earn.
- Paid Family Leave, 0.432% of wages in 2026, capped at $411.91 for the year. Above roughly $95,000 of salary you stop contributing partway through the year, and your later paychecks get slightly larger.
Both buy you something concrete. DBL covers part of your pay if illness or injury keeps you off work, and Paid Family Leave covers time off for a new child or a seriously ill relative. Under $450 a year combined.
Allowances on Form IT-2104
New York kept withholding allowances when the federal W-4 dropped them, so Form IT-2104 asks different questions from your federal form and the two numbers can legitimately differ. Each allowance is worth $1,000 off your taxable wages at state level, and another $1,000 at city level if you live in New York City.
If your IT-2104 has not been revisited since you moved, married, or had a child, it is worth a look. Filing a new one with your employer takes minutes and changes your very next paycheck.
New York paycheck calculator FAQ
New York State income tax runs from 4% to 10.9% depending on income, plus federal tax and 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare. New York City residents pay a further 2.05% to 4.25%, and Yonkers residents pay a 16.75% surcharge on their state tax. Disability and Paid Family Leave add under $450 a year combined.
No. The New York City income tax follows where you live, not where you work. A commuter from Westchester, Long Island or New Jersey does not owe it. If you live in the city and commute out to work, you still do.
Yonkers residents pay 16.75% of their net New York State income tax as a local surcharge, rather than a separate rate on wages. People who work in Yonkers but live elsewhere pay a different tax entirely, a flat 0.5% earnings tax on the wages they earn there.