I kept noticing my overtime paycheck felt wrong, so I built a small calculator

levi ali — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:05:36 +0000

I don’t work in payroll or accounting, but I’ve been doing some overtime lately and kept running into something a lot of people seem to notice:

You put in extra hours… and your paycheck doesn’t really feel like it goes up as much as you’d expect.

At first I figured I was just misunderstanding taxes or something with brackets. But the more I looked into it, the more it seemed like the issue usually isn’t “extra tax on overtime” — it’s how withholding gets calculated on a single pay period.

Basically, when your paycheck is higher than usual, payroll systems can treat it like you’re going to earn that higher amount all the time, so they withhold more temporarily. That can make your net pay look smaller than expected, even though your actual tax rate hasn’t changed.

It’s more of a timing/estimation thing than anything else.

I ended up putting together a small calculator just to see it more clearly:

👉 payscope.us

It lets you compare things like:

regular vs overtime hours
gross vs net pay
how withholding shifts when a paycheck is bigger than usual

Nothing fancy — just something to make the numbers easier to see instead of guessing in your head.

Honestly, I didn’t set out to build a “product.” It started more as a way to double-check my own assumptions about overtime pay.

If anyone here works with payroll or has a clearer way of explaining this without getting deep into tax rules, I’d be interested in hearing it.

DEV Community: levi ali

I kept noticing my overtime paycheck felt wrong, so I built a small calculator