Editorial & Fact-Check Policy
Paycheck Easy Guide is part of Easy Guides, a family of plain-English guides that explain confusing official processes, tax forms, paychecks, and government paperwork, in language anyone can follow. This page explains who produces our content, how we check it, and how we handle mistakes.
Who writes our guides
Our guides are produced and published by the Easy Guides editorial team, which owns and enforces our editorial standards. We are not a law firm, an accounting firm, or the IRS, and we say so plainly on every guide. We are a small independent publisher whose single job is turning official, jargon-heavy instructions into steps a normal person can act on.
How we research and write
Every guide starts from primary sources, the official documents that actually govern the topic, not other blogs. For Paycheck Easy Guide, that means IRS Publication 15 (Circular E), the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator, and current FICA rates. We link those sources directly inside each guide so you can verify anything yourself.
How we fact-check
Every federal figure on this site comes from one file we maintain, not from whatever a page happened to say when it was written. That file records the document each number came from and the date a person last checked it against that document. The current check date is 1 August 2026, against IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, IRS Notice 2025-67 and the Social Security Administration's 2026 wage base release.
That is enforced rather than intended. This site's tax data is compared against the master file every time the site is built, and a figure that disagrees fails the build. It is not possible to publish a page here carrying a federal number that differs from the one we checked.
Where a page states one of those figures, the source and the date we checked it are printed next to the number, not collected in a footnote. There are 75 such citations across 65 pages on this site. If a number has no source line, it is because it is not one of the federal figures that file governs, and we would rather show you nothing than attach a document that does not actually support it.
Accuracy and corrections
A corrections policy that has never described a correction is not evidence of anything, so here is a real one.
On 2 August 2026 we found a page still saying the child tax credit reduces withholding by $2,000. The 2026 figure is $2,200; it was raised by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A fix we ran in July had corrected the published page but not the file it is generated from, so the next rebuild put the old number back. The same day we found this site's pay stub guide telling search engines it was a duplicate of an image on another publisher's website, which would have kept it out of results entirely.
Where this comes from: One Big Beautiful Bill Act (2025), confirmed in IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32, checked 2026-08-01 · IRC §24(h) as amended by P.L. 119-21 (OBBBA, 2025).
If you find something wrong, email [email protected] with the page and the problem. We check it against the primary source and fix confirmed mistakes at the source the page is generated from, which is the only correction that stays fixed.
This is education, not professional advice
Our guides are educational. They are not tax, legal, or financial advice, and reading them does not create a professional relationship. For advice about your specific circumstances, consult a qualified professional or the relevant official source, such as IRS.gov.
How we use tools
The paycheck calculator, the 50 state calculators, and the bonus, overtime, raise, pre-tax and w-4 tools run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to be sent. Their arithmetic is covered by 93 assertions that run against the same code this site ships to you, not against a copy that might have drifted from it. A calculator that produces the wrong answer fails a build here.
Each tool also carries a section saying when it is the wrong tool for your question, on 56 pages of this site. A tool that never tells you it cannot help you is an advertisement with arithmetic in it.
We use modern research and drafting tools to work faster. Every guide is checked by a person against the primary sources above before it goes live. The accuracy standard and the final judgement are human, and they are ours.
Contact
Questions about how we work? Email [email protected].