What a German salary pays, and what it costs
The deduction most calculators get wrong is not a contribution but the allowance that sits in front of the tax: it is built from the employee's own contributions, and the health part of it is measured against a rate nobody actually pays. This follows the statute line by line.
Inputs
Tax class I: single, no children, in the statutory schemes. A different class changes the wage tax and nothing else on this page.
Verified 1 Oct 2026Federal Ministry of Finance and the Federal Government
Result: both sides at once
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Methodology and sources
The wage tax is the statutory tariff applied to the annual salary after three deductions: the employee lump sum, the special expenses lump sum, and a provision allowance built from the employee's own contributions. Two details inside that allowance decide the result. Its health part is measured against the reduced contribution rate of 14.0% rather than the rate actually paid, and its unemployment part counts only so far as it and the health and care parts together stay under 1,900 a year. Contributions stop at 8,450 a month for pension and unemployment and at 5,813 a month for health and care, the supplementary health rate is the official average of 2.9%, and no tax is due below 12,348 a year. The solidarity surcharge starts only once the wage tax passes 20,350 a year and phases in from there. Dollar figures use the European Central Bank reference rate of 0.8851 euro per dollar as of 1 Oct 2026.
- Income tax tariff from 2026: zones, coefficients and rounding · Federal Ministry of Finance, wage tax manual 2026, section 32a
- Order of deductions and the composition of the provision allowance · Federal Ministry of Finance, wage tax manual 2026, section 39b
- 2026 contribution ceilings: 8,450 and 5,812.50 per month · Federal Government, contribution ceilings for 2026
- Average supplementary health rate for 2026: 2.9% · Federal Ministry of Health
- Statutory minimum wage from 1 January 2026: 13.90 per hour · Federal Government
- Euro reference rate, refreshed daily · European Central Bank
Tax class I only: single, no children, in the statutory health and care schemes. The other classes change the wage tax and nothing else, so the employer cost on this page holds for all of them.
The supplementary health rate is the official average. A given fund may charge more or less, and that moves both the employee contribution and the wage tax.
Saxony splits the care contribution differently, leaving the employee a larger share, which this page does not model.
The annual wage tax is a whole euro and the employer withholds a twelfth of it rounded down to the cent, so a year of payslips comes to a few cents under the annual figure.