If a single person with no dependents has a job in California and the annual 
salary is $35,000, after state, federal, local(san mateo) taxes, Soc. Sec., 
medicare/medicaid, etc., are taken out, what is their actual "take home" for 
the year?  i.e., subtract everything that's not subjective (health insurance, 
etc).  Please provide evidence for your calculations and any other relevant 
information.

Hello from Google!

I have made the following assumptions to do this calculation:
2001 tax year
Single
No Dependents
No mortgage or other deductible costs which would bring itemized deductions 
above the standard deduction
No other income
No situation allowing for credits

The standard deduction for a single person is $4500, and the exemption amount 
for one is $2900, so the taxable income for the Federal Government (IRS) is 
$27550. The tax on that is $4202. California state taxes are $1124. FICA 
(Medicare and Social Security) are 7.65% of gross income, combined, or 
$2677.50, and California SDI is 0.9%, or $315.

At the end of the year, a person in this situation in San Mateo, California, 
earning an annual salary of $35,000 will have brought home $26,681.50, after 
taxes.

Useful sites to find this information are:

California Payroll Tax Basics
http://www.ccsfo.com/basics/payrolltax.htm

IRS Tax Tables
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

Turbo Tax for the Web
http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/welcome/perm/ttcommain/welcome.htm

Hope this has been helpful!

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Request for Answer Clarification by psalm27-ga on 19 Apr 2002 23:36 PDT

Why does your answer conflict with the comment?

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Clarification of Answer by jaq-ga on 20 Apr 2002 00:56 PDT

The comment was added by a non-Google-researcher, and is incorrect- it 
fails to take into account the standard deduction and single exemption for 
federal and state filing, and also assumes incorrectly that the federal tax 
amount (as found in the IRS tax table) includes Medicare and Social 
Security taxes, which it does not. It also doesn't include withholdings for 
California State Disability Insurance (CASDI).

For the year 2001, a single person with no dependents making $35,000 in 
California owes the following taxes:

$6,251     Federal (covering Soc Sec, Medicare, etc)
$1,443     State (California)

No local taxes are due in San Mateo unless you are a property owner.

Total tax is: $7,694
Total takehome is: $27,306

This information was derived from:

IRS website (and 2001 tax tables):
http://www.irs.gov
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

California Franchise Board website (and 2001 tax tables):
http://www.ftb.ca.gov
http://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/01_forms/01_rate.pdf

San Mateo Tax Collector website:
http://www.co.sanmateo.ca.us/taxcollector/securedroll/taxgeninfo.htm

Oops.  Yeah, I did forget the single exemption amount of $2900.

However, I think that FICA *is* included in the federal income tax tables, and 
the California SDI is included in the CA tax tables.

So, the total amount taxed should only be $5326 (Federal + California, from the 
tax tables respectively), leaving $29674 take-home.

In calculating your year-end taxes, after applying the exemption and figuring 
out your taxable income, you are instructed only to look up your tax in the tax 
table, implying that, in conjunction with your original estimated withholdings, 
the tax given in the tax table does indeed include FICA (and for California, 
also the SDI).

If this were not so, wouldn't doing your taxes then require two steps [after 
figuring your taxable income], first looking up the the federal tax amount, and 
then adding on the 7.65% for FICA?  There is no step for this in filling out 
your 1040, leading me to believe the FICA is indeed included in the tax table 
amount.