How to Read Your Paystub: A Guide

To read a pay stub, work through it in six steps: confirm your name and pay period, check your hours and pay rate, verify gross pay, review each deduction, confirm the net pay matches your deposit, and check the year to date totals at the bottom. Every pay stub follows roughly that order, whatever payroll system produced it.

A pay stub is a receipt for your work. It shows what you earned, what came out, and what actually reached your bank account. Here is what each section means and how to check that it is right.

Key Takeaways from this Article

• A pay stub summarizes one pay period: gross earnings at the top, deductions in the middle, net pay at the bottom, and year to date totals alongside.
• Read it in order. Most errors show up in the first two sections, in the hours or the pay rate, rather than in the tax math.
• No federal law requires employers to provide pay stubs, but many states do, Maine among them.
• Employer contributions listed on the stub are not deducted from your pay. They are what your employer pays on top of your wages.
• Year to date figures are the ones lenders and landlords ask for, and they are what your W-2 is built from at year end.

What is a Pay Stub?

A pay stub, also called a pay statement, paycheck stub, or wage statement, is a document summarizing how your wages were calculated for a single pay period. It shows your gross earnings, every tax and deduction withheld, and your net pay, which is the amount actually paid to you.

Pay stubs come on paper, electronically, or both. If you are paid by direct deposit you will usually find yours in an employee self-service portal such as isolved People Cloud. Because it documents income period by period, a pay stub is also what you will be asked for when applying for a loan, an apartment, or government assistance.

How Do You Read a Pay Stub?

Six steps, top to bottom.

1. Confirm your information. Check your name, employee ID, and the pay period dates. Make sure the period covers the time you actually worked, since a wrong date range is the fastest way to spot a missing shift.
2. Review hours and pay rate. Compare the hours listed against your timecard. If you are hourly, verify the rate too, particularly after a raise, when the old rate sometimes lingers a period longer than it should.
3. Check gross pay. This is everything you earned before anything came out. A missing bonus, shift, or overtime block shows up here.
4. Understand your deductions. Compare them against your benefit elections and against last period's stub. A new deduction you did not elect, or a familiar one that changed size, is worth a question.
5. Verify net pay. This should match what landed in your account to the cent. If it does not, the gap is in the deductions above it.
6. Look at year to date totals. Easy to skip, but these are what your W-2 is built from and what a lender will ask for.

If something looks wrong, raise it with your payroll or HR contact in the same pay period. Corrections made close to the error are simple; corrections made three months later mean amended filings.

What Information is on a Pay Stub?

Formats differ between payroll providers, but the components are consistent.

Employee Information

Your name, address, employee ID, and sometimes the last four digits of your Social Security number, along with the pay period start and end dates and the pay date itself. This section ties the stub to the right person and the right cycle.

Earnings

Your gross pay, broken into its parts: regular hours and wages, overtime, holiday or premium pay, tips paid through payroll, and any bonuses or commissions. Hourly employees see a rate and an hour count; salaried employees see a prorated share of annual salary.

Taxes and Deductions

Mandatory deductions are the ones required by law: federal income tax, state income tax where the state levies one, Social Security at 6.2% of wages up to the annual limit, Medicare at 1.45% of all wages, an additional Medicare tax of 0.9% on wages above $200,000 a year, and any state-required withholding such as Maine Paid Family and Medical Leave.

Voluntary deductions come from your own benefit elections: health, dental, or vision insurance, retirement contributions, an HSA or FSA, life or disability coverage, union dues. Some come out before taxes and some after, which is why two employees with the same salary can owe different amounts of tax.

Garnishments are court ordered and not optional for either party. Child support, tax levies, and student loan repayments fall here, and employers are legally required to withhold and remit them.

Employer Contributions

Amounts your employer pays on your behalf rather than deducting from your pay: their share of Social Security and Medicare, unemployment insurance premiums, a 401(k) match, and employer-paid portions of health coverage. This section is easy to misread as money being taken from you. It is the opposite, and it belongs in how you value the job.

Year to Date Totals

Running annual figures for gross pay, taxes and deductions, net pay, and hours worked. These are what you will reach for at tax time or when documenting income.

What is a Year End Pay Stub?

A year end pay stub is simply the last stub of the calendar year, and its year to date column represents your full year of earnings, taxes, and deductions. People look for it in January because it arrives weeks before the W-2 does and shows most of the same numbers.

It is not a substitute for the W-2, though. A W-2 applies specific tax rules that a pay stub does not, so the taxable wage figures in Box 1 will often differ from the gross pay on your final stub, usually because pre-tax deductions reduce taxable wages. Use the year end stub to get an early read, and file from the W-2.

Are Pay Stubs Required?

There is no federal law requiring employers to issue pay stubs, but many states have their own rule, and Maine is one of them. Maine employers must give employees detailed pay information each pay period, and pay periods must occur at least once every 16 days.

Beyond the legal requirement, issuing clear stubs does practical work. It gives employees visibility into their own pay, documents wage and hour compliance, creates the records both sides need for tax filings and unemployment claims, and gives everyone a chance to catch a mistake in the period it happened.

How Can Paper Trails Help?

A pay stub is where payroll becomes visible to your employees. When it is clear, you get fewer questions and more trust. When it is confusing or wrong, it costs you a conversation every pay period and, occasionally, a wage claim.

At Paper Trails, we run payroll and tax on the isolved platform, which gives every employee a self-service portal where they can pull their own stubs, W-2s, and year to date totals without going through you. If you want to see the numbers behind the deductions, our guide to gross pay versus net pay walks through the math, and Maine payroll taxes covers the state-specific withholding. Our pricing is published on our pricing page.

Updated: September 2026

Written by: Jon Portanova