Terms of Service

PaycheckForge is operated by Sertunç Özgüneş, an individual based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates ("PaycheckForge", "we"). PaycheckForge offers free, browser-based paycheck and payroll calculators for the 2026 tax year, together with salary data pages, guides and embeddable widgets. All calculations run locally in your browser. The service requires no account, no sign-up and no payment. By using the site you agree to these terms; if you do not agree, please do not use it.

Every result produced by PaycheckForge is an estimate for planning purposes only. Nothing on this site is tax, legal, payroll, accounting or financial advice, and PaycheckForge is not a payroll provider or tax preparer. Results must not be used as the sole basis for filing decisions, employment negotiations, payroll runs or financial commitments. Tax rules are simplified as documented on the methodology page; employer withholding, local taxes and individual circumstances can produce different outcomes. Always verify figures with your employer or payroll department, the IRS, your state tax agency, or a qualified professional before relying on them.

Calculations are built from cited public sources — IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, the Social Security Administration 2026 COLA fact sheet and Tax Foundation state income-tax tables — with retrieval dates published on the sources page. While we work to keep the model current, we do not warrant that results are complete or error-free, and figures may lag changes in law.

You may use PaycheckForge freely for personal and internal business purposes. You may not:

• misrepresent the service, its results or its data as your own, or resell access to it;
• present PaycheckForge estimates as official, exact or employer-verified payroll or tax figures;
• scrape, crawl or bulk-download the site at abusive rates or in a way that imposes unreasonable load, or bypass rate limits and technical protections;
• attempt to disrupt the availability or security of the site;
• remove attribution, licence or methodology notices from content or widgets you reuse.

Ordinary search-engine indexing, reasonable automated access that respects robots.txt, and linking to any page are welcome.

Publishers may embed the public widgets available under /embed/ on their own websites free of charge, for personal, educational or commercial use, provided that:

• the widget is embedded on a site served over HTTPS;
• the "Powered by PaycheckForge" attribution link and any methodology or source links inside the widget are not removed, hidden or altered;
• the results are presented as estimates and not as exact payroll, withholding or tax figures;
• the widget is not used to suggest that PaycheckForge endorses your site, product or service.

Widgets load from PaycheckForge servers and are updated automatically. PaycheckForge may change, suspend or withdraw any widget at any time, with or without notice, and may block embedding from sites that breach these terms. No warranty is given for embedded widgets; section 8 applies.

The site design, brand name, logos, calculator logic, source code and written content are owned by PaycheckForge. Public tax parameters belong to their respective sources. You may link to any page freely; reproducing substantial portions of the content requires attribution and a link.

Four resources are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence: the 2026 First Paycheck Classroom Activity (including its instructor key), the Salary Power dataset and PaycheckForge analysis published in the Annual Salary Power Report, the Raise Report dataset and PaycheckForge analysis published in The Raise Report 2026, and the 2026 Tax Rule Pack published at /rules-2026.json and described on the Methodology & Tax Engine page. Underlying IRS, SSA, Tax Foundation, BLS, BEA and other third-party data retain their own source terms. The CC BY 4.0 licence applies only to those four resources. It does not cover the PaycheckForge software and source code, calculator output, the PaycheckForge name, brand and logos, the site design, embed widgets or any other content on this site, all of which remain reserved.

Within the 2026 Tax Rule Pack, the CC BY 4.0 licence covers PaycheckForge's own original work: the JSON schema and structure, the federal tax and FICA/FUTA figures (sourced directly from primary IRS Revenue Procedure and SSA publications), the engine's derived and computed figures, and the accompanying methodology and presentation. It does not extend to the Rule Pack's states section: those figures are derived from Tax Foundation's published compilation of state income-tax rates and brackets, a third party's own compiled work. PaycheckForge does not grant a CC BY licence, or any other relicense, over that state data — refer to Tax Foundation directly for that data's own terms.

The site may display advertising served by Google AdSense — including once our AdSense application is approved, at which point ad units may begin appearing — uses consent-based analytics, and relies on Kit for the newsletter and Formspree for feedback forms. These third parties operate under their own terms and privacy policies; see the privacy policy for details on cookies, data flows and opt-outs.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, PaycheckForge is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any warranty of accuracy, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. PaycheckForge shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or other damages — including underpaid or overpaid taxes, penalties, lost income or lost profits — arising from use of, or reliance on, the service, its widgets or its results. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under the law that applies to you.

These terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates as applied in the Emirate of Dubai. Any dispute that cannot be resolved informally by emailing us first will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. If you are a consumer, you may also have protections under the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and nothing in this section takes those away.

These terms may be updated as the service evolves. The effective date above reflects the current version; continued use after changes constitutes acceptance.

Questions about these terms can be sent to hello@paycheckforge.com.