2026 · Georgia · Flat 5.19% and a $4,000 child allowance
Georgia Paycheck Calculator
Georgia replaced a graduated schedule with one flat rate in 2024 and paid for it by doubling the standard deduction and dropping the personal exemption. What is left is a single multiplication: 5.19% of everything above $12,000 for a single filer, with $4,000 off for each child. At $4,000 per child it is the largest dependent allowance in dollars of any state on this site, and it is the reason two Georgia households on the same salary can owe very different amounts.
Your Georgia paycheck, period by period
A Georgia salary is quoted per year and paid in slices: $52,000 is $1,000 a week, $2,000 every two weeks, $2,166.67 twice a month or $4,333.33 once a month. The annual total does not move; the deposit and the withholding taken from it do.
Georgia contributes one line to the stub, and on $52,000 paid every two weeks it is $79.85 per check — against $156.15 of federal income tax, $124.00 of Social Security and $29.00 of Medicare. That state line is exactly 5.19% of $40,000, because Georgia's $12,000 standard deduction comes off the top first. Paid weekly the state line is $39.92, and paid monthly it is $173.00; the annual figure, $2,076, is the same in all three cases.
| Pay frequency | Gross per check | Net per check | Net per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly | $1,000.00 | $805.50 | $41,886 |
| Bi-weekly | $2,000.00 | $1,611.00 | $41,886 |
| Semi-monthly | $2,166.67 | $1,745.25 | $41,886 |
| Monthly | $4,333.33 | $3,490.50 | $41,886 |
What comes out of a Georgia paycheck in 2026
Four deductions come out of a Georgia paycheck: federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare and Georgia income tax. Georgia has no state disability insurance, no paid family leave premium and no city or county wage tax, so the state contributes one line and nothing else.
Federal income tax
Federal tax is progressive: each slice of taxable income carries its own rate, so a raise never re-prices the dollars already earned. For a single filer in 2026 the bands are 10% to $12,400 of taxable income, 12% to $50,400, 22% to $105,700, 24% to $201,775, 32% to $256,225, 35% to $640,600 and 37% above that. A married couple filing jointly gets bands twice as wide up to the top bracket.
Federal taxable income is salary minus pre-tax deductions minus the standard deduction: $16,100 single, $32,200 joint, $16,100 married filing separately, $24,150 head of household. A single filer on $52,000 has $35,900 of federal taxable income and pays $4,060 across the year, about 7.8% of salary, even though the last dollar sits in the 12% band.
Social Security and Medicare
Social Security takes 6.2% of gross wages up to an annual wage base of $184,500 in 2026, so the largest employee contribution is $11,439; the employer matches it. Medicare takes 1.45% of every dollar with no ceiling, plus 0.9% on wages above $200,000 single or $250,000 joint that the employer does not match. On $52,000 the two lines come to $3,224 and $754.
Georgia income tax
Georgia's arithmetic is one subtraction and one multiplication. The subtraction is the standard deduction — $12,000 for a single filer or a separate return, $24,000 for a joint return, and $12,000 for a head of household, which is the same as single. The multiplication is 5.19% of what is left, plus a $4,000 subtraction for each dependent.
Georgia starts from federal adjusted gross income, so a traditional 401(k) contribution, an HSA contribution and a Section 125 health premium all reduce the Georgia base as well as the federal one. On $52,000 with a 6% deferral the Georgia line falls from $2,076.00 to $1,914.07 for the year, a saving of $161.93, and the federal line falls by $374.40 over the same contribution.
There is no second allowance to add. Georgia's personal exemption was folded into the standard deduction when the state moved to a flat rate, so $12,000 is the entire allowance for a single filer with no children — $4,100 less than the federal standard deduction on the same return. That gap is worth remembering when you compare a Georgia stub with a federal-only state: the federal base is wider than Georgia's, but Georgia's rate is low enough that the tax is smaller anyway.
How Georgia flattened its tax, and who the $4,000 is for
Until 2024 Georgia ran a six-bracket graduated schedule on top of a separate personal exemption and a separate dependent exemption. The 2024 restructuring collapsed all of it into three numbers: one rate, one standard deduction, one dependent allowance. The rate was set at 5.39% for 2024 and has stepped down to 5.19% for 2025 and 2026, and the statute allows further tenth-of-a-point reductions while revenue growth clears 3%, down to a floor of 4.99%.
The trade inside that restructuring matters more than the headline rate. The standard deduction more than doubled, which helped every filer. The personal exemption disappeared, which cost filers a smaller amount. The dependent exemption rose to $4,000, which helped families. The net effect is that a single renter without children came out slightly ahead, and a married couple with three children came out considerably further ahead, because $12,000 of extra dependent allowance at 5.19% is $622.80 a year.
That $4,000 is the number worth knowing, because it is unusually large. It is a third of the single standard deduction and it is not phased out at any income level — a household earning $300,000 claims the same $4,000 per child as one earning $40,000. The other states on this site that allow anything for dependents allow less in dollars: Kansas $2,320, Mississippi $1,500, and Utah through a credit worth $126.66 per child.
What Georgia does not do is adjust any of it for inflation. The $12,000 and the $24,000 are fixed in statute, and the state table this page is built from carries no inflation marker for Georgia at all, unlike the federal figures on the same return. Over time that is a quiet tax increase: the federal standard deduction rises every year, Georgia's does not, and the gap between the two bases widens.
Georgia also has no local wage tax. Ten states in the country let counties or cities tax wages; Georgia is not one of them, and there is no state disability or paid leave program either. A Georgia stub has exactly four lines on it, and only one of them is calculated by the state.
The narrower base is worth putting a number on. If Georgia used the federal standard deduction of $16,100 instead of its own $12,000, the tax on $52,000 would be $1,863.21 rather than $2,076.00 — $212.79 a year less. On $150,000 the same $4,100 gap is worth the same $212.79, because the rate is flat and the size of the base difference does not change with income. That is the one place where Georgia's design is quietly more expensive than it looks: the rate has come down below 5.2%, but the base it applies to is wider than the federal one by a fixed amount that is never indexed.
Georgia, Florida and North Carolina on the same salary
Georgia sits between a neighbor that charges nothing and a neighbor that charges less, which makes the comparison unusually clean: all three states have a single rate or no rate, so the only variables are the rate and the deduction. The table applies one set of assumptions — single filer, bi-weekly pay, no dependents, no pre-tax deductions.
| Salary | Georgia | North Carolina | Florida |
|---|---|---|---|
| $52,000 | $2,076 | $1,566 | $0 |
| $100,000 | $4,567 | $3,481 | $0 |
| $150,000 | $7,162 | $5,476 | $0 |
At $52,000 Georgia takes $2,076.00, North Carolina $1,566.07 and Florida nothing. The gap between Georgia and North Carolina is $509.93 a year, and it comes from two places: North Carolina's rate is 1.2 points lower, and its standard deduction is $750 higher. Because both states apply their rate to everything above a fixed deduction, the gap widens in a straight line — $1,085.93 at $100,000 and $1,685.93 at $150,000.
Against Florida there is no crossover at any salary. Georgia's tax is 5.19% of income above $12,000, so the difference is $2,076 at $52,000, $4,567.20 at $100,000 and $7,162.20 at $150,000. What offsets some of that in practice is everything a paycheck calculator cannot see: Florida's sales tax and property insurance premiums are both higher, and neither appears on a stub.
The row that matters for a family is missing from this table on purpose, because it depends on children rather than on salary. Two children in Georgia remove $8,000 of income, worth $415.20 a year, and Florida and North Carolina give nothing at all for them. That narrows the Georgia–North Carolina gap to $94.73 at $52,000 for a two-child household — which is the whole argument for reading a state comparison by household rather than by rate.
Georgia take-home pay by salary
The table below fixes one set of assumptions — single filer, bi-weekly pay, no dependents, no pre-tax deductions — so the rows are comparable down the column. The last four rows convert an hourly rate at 40 hours a week into the annual salary it represents.
Georgia's state tax rises in a straight line with salary, because there is only one rate. Measured against salary, the state rate starts at 3.63% on $40,000, reaches 3.99% at $52,000 and 4.57% at $100,000, then approaches 4.98% at $300,000 without ever arriving. The shortfall from 5.19% is the fixed $12,000 deduction, and because that deduction never grows, the state rate converges slowly upward for as long as the salary rises. For scale, Georgia takes $2,076 on a $52,000 salary against the federal government's $4,060, so the state line is about half of the federal one on the same check.
Read the net per year column as the amount that reaches a bank account across twelve months. If you are paid hourly the calculator multiplies the rate you enter by the hours and by 52, and the annual figure is what both the federal brackets and Georgia's 5.19% are applied to.
| Annual pay | Gross per check | State tax per year | Net per check | Net per year | Total effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $40,000 | $1,538.46 | $1,453 | $1,264.11 | $32,867 | 17.8% |
| $50,000 | $1,923.08 | $1,972 | $1,553.18 | $40,383 | 19.2% |
| $60,000 | $2,307.69 | $2,491 | $1,842.26 | $47,899 | 20.2% |
| $75,000 | $2,884.62 | $3,270 | $2,243.18 | $58,323 | 22.2% |
| $100,000 | $3,846.15 | $4,567 | $2,869.72 | $74,613 | 25.4% |
| $125,000 | $4,807.69 | $5,865 | $3,493.80 | $90,839 | 27.3% |
| $150,000 | $5,769.23 | $7,162 | $4,101.11 | $106,629 | 28.9% |
| $200,000 | $7,692.31 | $9,757 | $5,352.68 | $139,170 | 30.4% |
| $250,000 | $9,615.38 | $12,352 | $6,570.38 | $170,830 | 31.7% |
| $300,000 | $11,538.46 | $14,947 | $7,701.14 | $200,230 | 33.3% |
| $15/hr × 40h ($31,200/yr) | $1,200.00 | $996 | $1,009.72 | $26,253 | 15.9% |
| $20/hr × 40h ($41,600/yr) | $1,600.00 | $1,536 | $1,310.36 | $34,069 | 18.1% |
| $25/hr × 40h ($52,000/yr) | $2,000.00 | $2,076 | $1,611.00 | $41,886 | 19.4% |
| $30/hr × 40h ($62,400/yr) | $2,400.00 | $2,616 | $1,911.64 | $49,703 | 20.3% |
Filing status and dependents in Georgia
Filing status changes Georgia's arithmetic through the standard deduction only, because the rate is the same for everyone. A single filer on $52,000 pays $2,076.00; a married couple on the same salary pays $1,453.20, a difference of $622.80, which is exactly 5.19% of the extra $12,000 of deduction. Head of household is the odd one: Georgia gives a single parent the same $12,000 as a single filer, so filing as head of household changes the federal return and leaves the Georgia line untouched.
Dependents are where Georgia differs from most flat-rate states. Each child removes $4,000 of Georgia income, worth $207.60 of tax a year, and the allowance does not phase out. A single filer on $52,000 with two children pays $1,660.80 instead of $2,076.00, which is 3.19% of salary rather than 3.99%. With four children the Georgia line falls to $1,245.60, below North Carolina's figure for the same salary with no children at all.
Married filing separately takes the $12,000 single deduction and half the federal bracket width, so it usually costs more overall than filing jointly. It is worth doing only where a student loan repayment plan, a medical deduction or a liability concern makes the separate return necessary.
Assumptions and sources
Ruleset 2026.1, verified 2026-10-31. Federal brackets and the standard deduction come from IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 (§4.01 and §4.14). Social Security and Medicare rates, the $184,500 wage base and the 0.9% additional Medicare threshold come from IRS Publication 15 (2026), Circular E. The Child Tax Credit amounts are the 2026 figures published by the IRS.
Georgia's rate is 5.19% for 2026, unchanged from 2025. The standard deduction is $12,000 single, $24,000 joint and $12,000 head of household. There is no personal exemption. The dependent exemption is $4,000 per dependent and is not phased out. None of these amounts is indexed for inflation.
Not modelled: Georgia's retirement income exclusion, the credit for taxes paid to another state, the low-income tax credit, wage garnishments, union dues, post-tax deductions, bonuses withheld at supplemental rates and mid-year pay changes. Figures are estimates, not a filing.
- Georgia Department of Revenue — individual income tax and Form 500 instructions
- IRS Publication 15 (2026), Circular E — FICA rates and wage base
- IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 — 2026 brackets and standard deduction
Related calculators
- North Carolina paycheck calculator — a lower flat rate, and nothing at all for children
- Florida paycheck calculator — what the same salary keeps with no state tax
Frequently asked questions
Does Georgia have a state income tax?
Yes, at a flat 5.19% for 2026. Georgia moved from a graduated schedule to a single rate in 2024 and has stepped the rate down since, with a statutory path toward a floor of 4.99% while revenue targets are met.
What is Georgia's standard deduction for 2026?
$12,000 for a single filer or a married person filing separately, $24,000 for a joint return and $12,000 for head of household. It is not indexed for inflation, so it stays at $12,000 while the federal figure rises.
Does Georgia have a personal exemption?
No. The personal exemption was folded into the standard deduction when Georgia moved to a flat rate, so $12,000 is the entire allowance for a single filer with no children. Dependents are separate and still allowed.
How much is the Georgia dependent exemption?
$4,000 per dependent, with no phase-out at any income level. At 5.19% that is worth $207.60 of Georgia tax a year per child. It is the largest dependent allowance in dollars of any state on this site.
How much is taken out of a paycheck in Georgia?
On $52,000 paid bi-weekly, $389.00 comes out of a $2,000 check: $156.15 of federal income tax, $124.00 of Social Security, $29.00 of Medicare and $79.85 of Georgia income tax. That leaves $1,611.00, or 80.5 cents of every dollar.
How much is a $100,000 salary in Georgia after tax?
$2,869.72 per bi-weekly check, or $74,612.80 across the year, for a single filer with no dependents and no pre-tax deductions. Georgia takes $4,567.20 of that, which is 5.19% of $88,000.
Does Georgia have local income taxes?
No. No county or city in Georgia levies an income tax or a payroll tax on wages. Georgia also has no state disability insurance and no paid family leave premium, so a Georgia stub carries one state line and nothing else.
Why is my Georgia tax not exactly 5.19% of my salary?
Because the rate applies to income above the standard deduction, not to salary. On $52,000 the base is $40,000, so the tax is 3.99% of salary. The percentage converges on 5.19% as salary rises but never reaches it, because a fixed deduction never disappears.
Do 401(k) and HSA contributions reduce Georgia tax?
Yes. Georgia starts from federal adjusted gross income, so a traditional 401(k) contribution, an HSA contribution and a Section 125 health premium all reduce the Georgia base. A 6% deferral on $52,000 cuts the Georgia line from $2,076.00 to $1,914.07.
Is Georgia cheaper than North Carolina on the same salary?
No. North Carolina's 3.99% rate and $12,750 deduction beat Georgia's 5.19% and $12,000 at every salary: $2,076.00 against $1,566.07 on $52,000. Children are the exception, because Georgia allows $4,000 per dependent and North Carolina allows nothing.
Other states
- California paycheck calculator — graduated state tax plus 1.3% SDI on every dollar
- Colorado paycheck calculator — a flat 4.4% applied to federal taxable income
- Florida paycheck calculator — no state income tax and no local wage tax
- Illinois paycheck calculator — one flat 4.95% rate for every income level
- Indiana paycheck calculator — a flat 2.95% and a county tax in all 92 counties
- Iowa paycheck calculator — a flat 3.8% that starts from the federal standard deduction
- Kansas paycheck calculator — two brackets and a $9,160 personal exemption
- Kentucky paycheck calculator — a flat 3.5% on a $3,360 deduction that never doubles
- Louisiana paycheck calculator — a flat 3% with a $12,875 standard deduction
- Michigan paycheck calculator — a flat 4.25% with $5,900 per person and city taxes on top
- Mississippi paycheck calculator — nothing below $18,300 of salary, then 4%
- Nevada paycheck calculator — no state income tax and no local wage tax either
- North Carolina paycheck calculator — a flat 3.99% with no allowance for dependents
- North Dakota paycheck calculator — no tax below $48,475 of taxable income, then 1.95%
- Oregon paycheck calculator — graduated state tax plus 0.6% paid leave
- Pennsylvania paycheck calculator — 3.07% flat plus local earned income tax
- Texas paycheck calculator — no state income tax, so federal is the whole story
- Utah paycheck calculator — a flat 4.5% with a credit that fades as income rises
- Virginia paycheck calculator — $8,750 standard deduction against state tax
- Paycheck calculator by state — all 50 states and DC in one grid, federal-only where no page exists yet