The short answer
A pay stub documents how one paycheck was calculated. At minimum it should identify the employer and employee, define the pay period, and show gross pay, each deduction, and the resulting net pay — with year-to-date totals alongside the current period.
Employer and employee identification
The employer's legal name and address belong at the top. The employee section carries the name and address, and usually a masked identifier such as the last four digits of a Social Security number. A full SSN should never appear on a pay stub; masking is the standard precisely because stubs get photocopied and emailed.
The pay period and pay date
These are two different dates and they are routinely confused. The pay period is the range of days worked, for example the 1st through the 14th. The pay date is when the money is actually paid, which is typically several days later. A stub showing a pay date inside its own pay period is one of the fastest ways to spot a document that was not produced by real payroll.
Earnings
- Regular pay — the hourly rate multiplied by hours worked, or the salary allocated to that period.
- Overtime — normally 1.5× the regular rate for hours beyond 40 in a week, listed on its own line with its own rate and hours.
- Bonuses or commission — shown separately from regular wages.
Taxes withheld
Four withholdings appear on nearly every W-2 employee's stub:
- Federal income tax, based on wages, filing status, and the current brackets.
- Social Security, 6.2% of wages up to an annual wage base. Once an employee's year-to-date wages exceed that base, this withholding stops for the rest of the year — which is why high earners see their take-home rise late in the year.
- Medicare, 1.45% with no cap, plus an additional 0.9% on wages above $200,000.
- State income tax, which varies enormously. Nine states have no income tax on earned wages at all; others use progressive brackets.
Year-to-date columns
Every earnings and deduction line should also show a year-to-date figure. These are cumulative totals for the calendar year, and they are what lenders and landlords actually read when they want to understand annual income from a single document. YTD figures must increase consistently from one stub to the next — inconsistent YTD progression across a set of stubs is the single most common error in documents that were assembled by hand.
Which states require pay stubs
There is no federal law requiring employers to hand out pay stubs. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep accurate pay records, not to give employees a copy. State law fills the gap, and it falls roughly into three groups: states with no requirement, "access" states where employers must make records available electronically or on request, and "access/print" states where employees must be able to obtain a printable copy. California, New York, and Texas all impose their own specifics on what the statement must contain.
A note on accuracy
A pay stub is a record of wages that were genuinely earned. Recreating a lost stub for wages you actually received is ordinary record-keeping. Producing one that overstates income to obtain credit, housing, or benefits is fraud, and the YTD arithmetic is usually what gives it away.