How the numbers work

One employee, standard allowances only

Each calculation assumes a single employee on a salary for a full tax year, with no dependants and no income other than employment income. Only the standard allowance or standard deduction for that country is applied. Personal deductions, family reliefs and individual credits are out of scope, because they differ from person to person and would make two countries impossible to compare on equal terms.

From gross salary to net pay

The model starts from the annual gross salary in the country's own currency, then runs these steps in this order:

• Percentage deduction. Where a country gives a standard deduction as a percentage of gross pay (an employment-expenses deduction, for example), it is subtracted first, up to a fixed cap where the law sets one.
• Standard allowance. The country's standard allowance or personal exemption is subtracted. What remains is the taxable income.
• Band tax. Taxable income is run through the country's cumulative brackets: each slice of income is charged at its own band's rate.
• Regional layer. Where a country page includes a state, provincial or cantonal layer, that tax is computed on gross pay minus the percentage deduction and the regional allowance, then added to the national tax.
• Levies. A levy charged on gross pay is banded and added; a levy charged as a percentage of taxable income is added on that base.
• Rebate cap. Where the law wipes out tax below a set level of taxable income (India's Section 87A rebate works this way), tax is set to zero when taxable income is at or below the cap.
• Tax credits. Any standard tax credit in the model is then subtracted from the tax, never taking it below zero.
• Cess or surtax. Where a country charges a percentage on top of the tax itself, it is applied to the resulting tax.
• Social contributions. Each employee contribution is computed on gross pay: nothing is charged below its floor, its rate applies to pay up to its cap, and where a lower rate applies above the cap, that rate is charged on the excess.
• Net pay. Net is gross minus tax minus social contributions. The effective rate is total deductions over gross, the marginal rate is read from the brackets at the taxable income, and the tax freedom day spreads the effective rate across the calendar year.

Official publications first, every check dated

Rates come from a fixed hierarchy: official tax authority publications first, then PwC Tax Summaries, then KPMG. A figure is used only when it traces to one of those. Every country record stores its source name, a link to the source and the date it was checked, and the country page prints all three. The current set of 111 country records was checked in October 2026.

Currency conversions use one dated snapshot per month: European Central Bank reference rates, with the open.er-api snapshot for currencies the ECB does not publish. The current snapshot is dated 28 October 2026. Tax is always computed in local currency first; conversion happens afterwards, for display and comparison only.

The purchasing-power view on the homepage answers a different question — what the take-home pay buys — and uses a separate dataset: the World Bank's International Comparison Program price level for each country, published as its purchasing power parity conversion factor divided by its market exchange rate, with the United States set to 1.00. Take-home pay is divided by that ratio to restate it at US prices, so pay kept where prices are lower counts for more. The current set holds the Bank's 2024–2025 values and was checked on 29 October 2026. Two limits matter. The ratio is a general price level averaged across the whole basket of goods and services: it is not a rent index, not a cost index for any particular city and not a survey of household living costs. And the Bank publishes no figure for Monaco or Taiwan, so those two countries show their unadjusted take-home in this view, marked with an asterisk, rather than borrowing a neighbour's prices.

Where the model simplifies, stated openly

A single model covering 111 tax systems has to simplify. The classes of simplification are these, and any country where one applies says so on its own page:

• Credits as allowance-equivalents. In a few countries a standard credit is converted into an equivalent allowance amount. The arithmetic is identical at every income, so the result is the same either way.
• Contributions and the tax base. The model does not subtract employee contributions from taxable income, even in countries where the law does. In those countries the income tax shown runs slightly high.
• Regional variation. Where rates vary inside a country, the page uses one named region (Ontario in Canada, Zurich in Switzerland) or a stated national average (Denmark's municipal rates are folded into its combined scale). The page names the choice.
• Approximations. A handful of countries rest on stepped or blended figures because the real system is calculated per payslip or per formula: Japan's deductions, France's combined social rate, Mexico's IMSS blend. Their pages say so, and the Netherlands page states plainly that its figures are an upper bound because the standard credits are left out.
• Zero-tax countries. Where a country charges no income tax on employment income, the page says so rather than dressing up an empty calculation. Employee contributions that do exist there are still modelled.

Each country page carries a box titled "What this calculator leaves out" with that country's own list. If the box and this page ever disagree, the country page is the one to trust for that country.

Three pages that show the model at work

Spotted a rate that disagrees with an official source? Send it in through the contact page. Corrections are checked against the country record and the checked date moves when a figure changes.