FICA

FICA paystub meaning: The law behind two payroll taxes on your stub: 6.2% Social Security and 1.45% Medicare, deducted as you are paid and matched by your...

The law behind two payroll taxes on your stub: 6.2% Social Security and 1.45% Medicare, deducted as you are paid and matched by your employer.

FICA is the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, the law that authorises the two payroll taxes nearly every U.S. employee pays. It is a law, not a single line item, which is why many stubs never print the word FICA at all. They split it into a Social Security line and a Medicare line instead, and both are FICA. The employee side has two parts. Social Security is 6.2% of covered wages, charged only up to an annual wage base — in 2026 that base is $184,500. Medicare is 1.45% of every dollar of covered wages, with no cap at all. Together they come to 7.65%, which is the number most people mean when they say FICA. Your employer pays the same 6.2% and 1.45% from its own funds, so 15.3% in total reaches the trust funds. The employer half is not deducted from you and should never appear as a deduction on your stub. FICA behaves nothing like federal income tax. There are no brackets, your Form W-4 does not change it, and claiming exemption from income tax withholding on a W-4 does not stop it. It is charged on wages as they are paid, period by period, and it is not trued up on your return the way income tax withholding is. One wrinkle causes most of the confusion: pre-tax deductions do not all behave alike. A Section 125 health premium reduces the wages FICA is charged on. A traditional 401(k) deferral does not. That is why W-2 Box 1 is usually smaller than Boxes 3 and 5.

Tax entries on a pay statement depend on taxable wages, current employee elections, filing status, pay frequency, jurisdiction, and current agency instructions. Compare the current-period amount with year-to-date totals and the employer-issued record before treating it as final.

When this term appears on a statement, read its label, current amount, year-to-date amount, pay-period context, and any adjacent rate or hours together. Resolve a mismatch with the original issuer or the cited authority rather than changing a record to force a preferred result.