Figure out the percentage of your gross pay.
It's common knowledge that what you get paid and what you take home is not the same. If your base salary is $36,000 per year, you theoretically should take home $3,000 per month, but your actual salary, what your check is made out for, is going to be less. Gross pay is another term for base salary; net pay is often used to denote actual salary. Taxes, social security and other deductions can take a big chunk out of your pay. To figure out what percentage of your base salary your actual salary amounts to, add up your deductions and perform the division to render it as a percentage.
Gross Pay or Base Salary
Find your gross pay on your paystub. It should be marked clearly. Use the gross pay for the pay period, not the gross pay for the year. Your gross pay is the full pay you have earned, but not what you will take home.
Deductions
Add up your total deductions. These may be such things as Medicare, local and state taxes, federal taxes, and Social Security. Leave out things like direct deposits to savings accounts, unless you want to not count them as actual pay. That money is still going to you, as it's deposited to your account rather than paid by the check.
Percentage of Deductions
Figuring the percentage is a division operation. Divide the deductions by your gross pay to get a percentage for them. For instance, if your deductions total $87.22, and your gross pay is $460.00 for the pay period, the result is 0.1896, or about 19 percent. Your deductions are 19 percent of your base salary in this example.
Figuring Percentage for Actual Salary
To find the percentage your actual salary constitutes of your base salary, just subtract the percentage of your deductions from 100. Here, this leaves 81 percent. That means your actual salary is 81 percent of your base salary. You can use this number for hypothetical future situations. If your salary goes up, though, you may end up in a different tax bracket. That could increase the percentage of your deductions. Check with human resources to see what could change in regard to the new deductions.
Tags: percentage your, your base, your base salary, actual salary, your actual, your actual salary
