Your paycheck, in plain language
Make sense of your pay statement.
See what a line means, separate this check from year-to-date totals, and prepare better questions for payroll.
Your PDF or image is read on this device. It is not uploaded to P.A.Y., saved to your account or sent to an AI service. We show supported financial fields, not a picture or full transcript of your statement.
1. Choose a statement, or try the example.
US-dollar statements using 1,234.56 amounts. No currency conversion. PDF, PNG or JPEG · up to 12 MB · at most 6 PDF pages · at most 20 megapixels. Use a static, unlocked PDF. Text recognition can miss or merge numbers, so you will review the results.
Your free P.A.Y. profile unlocks local file reading. The fictional example and manual comparison work without signing in.
Checking the free-profile tools. No file has been selected.
The file picker uses files you choose. Original file names and identifying statement lines are not displayed in the review. Clear removes the page’s results and values; your original file stays unchanged. Leaving the page also clears this review.
2. Check the current-pay arithmetic.
This optional comparison uses amounts you enter. It does not calculate required taxes or decide whether payroll was legally correct. Missing amounts stay missing; enter zero only if you checked that zero applies.
Why gross and one bank deposit may not match
Noncash benefits can be included in a taxable wage record without adding cash to this check. Deposits may be split between accounts. Reimbursements can be paid separately, and an offset can prevent paying an already-received benefit twice. Check the statement’s totals and your payroll team’s explanation before treating a difference as an error.
3. Optional: download confirmed amounts for planning.
You can keep entering planner values manually. Nothing is transferred automatically. This optional file contains only the financial fields you select and confirm—not your statement, original wording, name, employer, identifiers, address or bank details.
Choose and review a small local amounts file
Export is off until you choose, review and confirm fields.
Gross pay is reference only, not a substitute for federal taxable wages. An export cannot determine annual tax or a refund. Paydate and frequency are not exported in this first version; confirm them in the planner. A file you choose to download stays on your device until you remove it.
When something is unclear
Start with the pay date, the line label, which amount you expected, and what the statement actually shows. Contact your employer’s payroll team promptly through its secure channel. Do not send a full statement, Social Security number or bank details through a public comment or general web form.
Paycheck, W-2 and W-4 guide → · Paycheck worksheet and official-source lookup →
For a separate annual federal withholding estimate, use the official IRS Tax Withholding Estimator ↗. This page does not send it your statement or amounts. IRS: how federal tax withholding works ↗.
What this explainer can and cannot establish
It provides original explanations for supported labels and a cents-based comparison of values you confirm. An unfamiliar code stays unrecognized until you identify it. It does not infer a benefit’s taxability, tax elections, jurisdiction, final tax liability or whether an employer’s calculations comply with the law. Low-quality scans and unusual layouts can require manual review.
Local file privacy
The reader uses self-hosted open-source PDF and image-reading components. Their public code and language model load from P.A.Y.; the selected file is processed locally. File contents and results are not sent to an upload API or stored in browser storage. If you deliberately review and download selected confirmed amounts, that separate small financial-data file is saved by your browser; it does not include the statement or identities. The free-profile check is separate from statement reading. Results remain in this page’s memory until you clear or leave it; this is not a secure document-redaction or device-erasure tool.