United States Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN THE US. 1. FUTA at 6.0% instead of 0.6%. The statute (§3301) says 6 percent; the operative rate is 0.6 percent after the 5.4-point credit under §3302. A tenfold overstatement is the single largest arithmetic risk here. 2. The Additional Medicare Tax withholding trigger vs. the liability threshold. $200,000 triggers employer withholding for everyone regardless of filing status (26 CFR §31.3102-4(a)); the employee's actual liability threshold is $250,000 / $125,000 / $200,000 by filing status (§3101(b)(2)). These are different numbers doing different jobs, reconciled by the individual on Form 8959. Conflating them is the classic error. There is NO employer match on this 0.9 percent. 3. Thresholds that are not ceilings, and are not indexed. Three fixed dollar amounts sit in US payroll and none of them move with the OASDI base: the Additional Medicare Tax thresholds (unchanged since 2013), the FUTA wage base of $7,000 (unchanged since 1983), and the coverage thresholds below which employment is not covered at all — $3,000 for domestic workers (26 U.S.C. §3121(x)) and $2,500 for election officials and election workers (SSA §218(c)(8)(B)) for 2026. The last two are COVERAGE/REGISTRATION thresholds, not contribution floors: a domestic worker paid $2,999 in 2026 is outside FICA entirely, but one paid $3,000 is liable on the whole amount from the first dollar, not just the excess. Do not model them as an exempt band. 4. The OASDI ceiling is per employer, not per person. Each employer withholds up to $184,500 of wages independently. A multi-job employee over-contributes and reclaims the excess as a refundable credit on Form 1040 under §31(b); no employer is refunded. Engines that try to net this across employers produce under-withholding and an employer liability. 5. DEDUCTIBILITY: the employee's FICA contribution is NOT deductible before federal income tax. 26 U.S.C. §275(a)(1) expressly disallows a deduction for "the tax imposed by section 3101". US federal income tax is therefore computed on gross wages without any social-insurance relief — the opposite of most European systems, and a material net-pay error if an engine ported from an EU model applies a deduction. (Only the self-employed get relief, and only for half the SECA tax, under §164(f).) By contrast, employee-side STATE disability/PFML contributions are generally treated as deductible state taxes on Schedule A for itemizers — a different rule from the federal one. 6. Ceilings are annual and cumulative year-to-date, never monthly. All ceiling_monthly fields are null on purpose. Dividing $184,500 by 12 and applying a monthly cap is wrong: an employee paid a large Q1 bonus hits the ceiling in March and pays nothing further, which a monthly cap would not reproduce. 7. FICA base ≠ income-tax base. Elective 401(k)/403(b)/457(b) deferrals are excluded from income-tax wages but remain fully FICA-liable; §125 cafeteria-plan salary reductions are excluded from both. Running one wage base for both taxes is a defect. 8. Liability does NOT depend on nationality or immigration status. Unlike several Gulf schemes, US FICA attaches to employment performed in the United States regardless of the worker's citizenship or residence — undocumented workers are liable, and so are resident aliens. The narrow exceptions are category-based, not nationality-based: nonresident-alien students and scholars in F-1/J-1/M-1/Q-1 status are exempt under §3121(b)(19), and certain nonresident aliens are covered instead by a bilateral Totalization Agreement (the US has around 30) which assigns liability to one country only, evidenced by a certificate of coverage. Age is irrelevant — there is no upper or lower age exemption; a working pensioner drawing Social Security still pays FICA in full. 9. SCOPE EXCLUSIONS. This record covers an ordinary private-sector employee. Not covered: railroad employees, who fall outside FICA entirely and instead pay Railroad Retirement Tax Act (RRTA) Tier 1 and Tier 2 contributions with their own separate rates and their own ceilings (the Tier 2 ceiling keys off the "old-law" base, $137,100 for 2026); certain state and local government employees in retirement systems outside Social Security, who pay Medicare only; ministers and members of religious orders; and student employees of the school they attend (§3121(b)(10)). SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: EMPLOYER-SIDE, EVERY STATE: state unemployment insurance (SUTA) is experience-rated per employer per state — no national rate, see the state_unemployment scheme. Workers' compensation likewise. EMPLOYEE-SIDE DEDUCTIONS — the following are verified 2026 figures read on each administering authority's own page. ISO 3166-2 codes given. US-CA (California) — State Disability Insurance incl. Paid Family Leave: employee 1.3%, EMPLOYEE-ONLY, and there is NO taxable wage ceiling (all wages liable). Source: EDD "Rates and Withholding" 2026. The wage ceiling was abolished by SB 951 (2022) with effect from 2024 — an engine still carrying a CA SDI cap is wrong. Instrument: California Unemployment Insurance Code §984. US-NJ (New Jersey) — four separate employee deductions, 1 Jan to 31 Dec 2026, per NJ DOL "Rate Information": Unemployment Insurance 0.3825% and Workforce Development/Supplemental Workforce 0.0425%, both on a $44,800 base; Temporary Disability Insurance 0.19% and Family Leave Insurance 0.23%, both on a separate and much higher $171,100 base. TWO DIFFERENT WAGE BASES IN ONE STATE — applying one to all four lines is a defect. US-WA (Washington) — TWO separate employee deductions. Paid Family & Medical Leave: total premium 1.13% for 2026 (up from 0.92%), split employee 71.43% / employer 28.57%, i.e. employee ≈0.8072%, capped at the OASDI base; employers with fewer than 50 employees owe no employer share. PLUS WA Cares Fund (long-term care): 0.58% EMPLOYEE-ONLY with NO wage cap, statutorily capped at 0.58%. Sources: ESD news release on the 2026 rate; WA Cares Fund. Missing WA Cares is a common omission. US-MA (Massachusetts) — PFML total 0.88% of eligible wages, capped at the Social Security taxable maximum. Employers with 25+ covered individuals: employee bears up to 0.18% (family, up to 100% withholdable) + 0.28% (medical, up to 40% withholdable) = 0.46% max; employer bears 0.42%. Employers with fewer than 25 covered individuals: effective rate 0.46%, entirely withholdable from the employee, no employer share. Source: Mass.gov DFML contribution rates page. US-RI (Rhode Island) — Temporary Disability Insurance / Temporary Caregiver Insurance: 1.1% for calendar 2026 (down from 1.3%), taxable wage base $100,000, maximum contribution $1,100.00. EMPLOYEE-ONLY — DLT states "TDI is paid by employees, not employers". RI unemployment is employer-only. Source: RI DLT press release, 18 December 2025. US-CO (Colorado) — FAMLI: 0.88% total, split 0.44% employer / 0.44% employee, on wages up to the federal Social Security wage cap. Employers with nine or fewer employees owe no employer share and remit only the 0.44% employee portion. Statutory maximum premium 1.2%. Employees may never be charged more than 50% of the total. Source: famli.colorado.gov. US-OR (Oregon) — Paid Leave Oregon: 1.0% of gross wages up to $184,500, split employee 60% (0.6%) / employer 40% (0.4%). Employers with fewer than 25 employees owe no employer share but must still withhold and remit the employee share. Statutory maximum 1.0%. Source: paidleave.oregon.gov. US-MN (Minnesota) — Paid Leave: NEW, contributions began 1 January 2026. Total premium 0.88% (family 0.27% + medical 0.61%), capped at the OASDI limit; employer may withhold up to 0.44% from the employee and bears the remainder. Small-employer rate 0.66% (30 or fewer employees and average wage no more than 150% of the state average). Source: Minnesota Paid Leave. Rate held at 0.88% for 2027. US-NY (New York) — Paid Family Leave: employee-funded at 0.432% of gross wages for 2026, capped at the NY State Average Weekly Wage of $1,833.63/week, maximum annual employee contribution $411.91. Source: paidfamilyleave.ny.gov/2026. US-AK (Alaska) — the only state with a substantial employee UNEMPLOYMENT contribution: employee rate 0.50%, taxable wage base $54,200 for 2026, alongside an employer rate of 1.00% to 5.40% by rate class. Source: Alaska DOLWD 2026 Unemployment Insurance Tax Rates. US-PA (Pennsylvania) — employee UC withholding 0.07% of TOTAL GROSS WAGES with NO CAP. L&I states expressly that employee contributions "are not limited to the taxable wage base in effect for employer contributions". Rate has been 0.07% since 2023 and is set by a solvency trigger mechanism. Source: PA L&I "Employee Withholding". US-HI (Hawaii) — Temporary Disability Insurance: NO SINGLE STATE RATE. The employer may pay the whole cost or share it equally with employees, but the employee's contribution may not exceed 0.5% of weekly wages nor an annually-set maximum weekly deduction. The actual figure depends on whether the employer runs an insured plan, an approved self-insured plan, or a collective bargaining agreement. Instrument: HRS chapter 392. Source: Hawaii DLIR Disability Compensation Division. STATES WITH EMPLOYEE-SIDE SCHEMES I DID NOT VERIFY THIS SESSION — see "refused": Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New York statutory disability (DBL, distinct from PFL above), and Puerto Rico. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. FUTA CREDIT REDUCTION STATES for 2025 and 2026 — no numbers given. The IRS page defers to the Department of Labor, and the DOL page at oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/futa_credit.asp publishes the actual lists ("Historical FUTA Credit Reductions 2010-2025" and "Potential 2026 Credit Reductions") only as downloadable Excel files, which I did not open. I will not name states or additional rates I did not read. This affects the employer's effective FUTA rate only, never the employee. 2. STATE UNEMPLOYMENT (SUTA) EMPLOYER RATES — refused by design and correctly so. Experience-rated per employer per state; there is no national or even per-state single rate. Not attempted, per scope. 3. WORKERS' COMPENSATION PREMIUMS — refused. Employer-risk-rated by occupational class code and set by carrier or state fund filings; no national rate exists. 4. HAWAII TDI EMPLOYEE RATE — nulls are the correct answer. The statutory ceiling on the employee share (0.5% of weekly wages, plus an annually-set maximum weekly deduction) is verified, but the operative figure is employer-plan-specific and the employer may lawfully pay the entire cost. I did not retrieve the 2026 maximum weekly deduction amount. 5. STATES I COULD NOT VERIFY THIS SESSION — flagged rather than guessed, because each carries a real employee-side deduction and omitting them silently would be worse than naming the gap: Connecticut PFML (employee-funded, believed capped at the Social Security wage base); Delaware Paid Leave (contributions began 2025); Maine Paid Family and Medical Leave (contributions began 2025); Maryland FAMLI (repeatedly delayed — commencement date not confirmed); New York statutory disability benefits (DBL), which is SEPARATE from the NY PFL figure I did verify and carries its own long-standing employee contribution; and Puerto Rico disability (SINOT) and its other territorial levies. No rate is asserted for any of these. They should be researched before the US record is sold as complete at state level. 6. NO FEDERAL DISABILITY, SICKNESS, MATERNITY OR PAID-LEAVE CONTRIBUTION EXISTS — this is a genuine absence, not a gap in the research. The United States has no national scheme in these branches; cover is purely state-level and a majority of states have none at all. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE: 1. OASDI contribution and benefit base for 2027: not yet determined. Social Security Act §230(a) requires SSA to publish it in the Federal Register on or before 1 November 2026. Set a re-verify deadline of 5 November 2026 — this figure moves almost every year (2025: $176,100 → 2026: $184,500, a 4.77% rise driven by the 2024 national average wage index of $69,846.57). Every scheme keyed to "the OASDI limit" (Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington PFML) moves with it automatically. 2. Massachusetts PFML, effective 1 January 2027: Chapter 101 of the Acts of 2026 restructures the contribution split, shifting employer contributions from medical leave to family leave in order to mitigate recent IRS guidance on the tax treatment of MA PFML benefits. From 2027, up to 40% of the FAMILY leave contribution is withholdable from the employee with employers of 25+ bearing the remaining 60%, and up to 100% of the MEDICAL leave contribution is withholdable — the reverse of the current allocation. The total 2027 rate had not been set when read; MA sets rates annually by 1 October. Re-verify after 1 October 2026. 3. Minnesota Paid Leave: premium rate confirmed unchanged at 0.88% for 2027. 4. FUTA credit reduction under §3302(c)(2): states with unrepaid federal unemployment advances lose 0.3 percentage points of credit per additional year, raising their effective FUTA rate above 0.6%. This is redetermined every 30 November for that calendar year. Re-verify each December. 5. No federal legislation changing the FICA rates, the FUTA rate, the $7,000 FUTA base or the Additional Medicare Tax thresholds was identified. All four have been stable for many years and none is indexed. SOURCING CAVEATS: VERIFIED BY FETCHING (URLs actually retrieved and read): - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html — SSA Office of the Chief Actuary; 2026 base $184,500, 6.2% each side, Medicare 1.45% each side uncapped. Read via the browser; SSA returns HTTP 403 to automated fetch. - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/03/2025-19763/cost-of-living-increase-and-other-determinations-for-2026 — full text of the SSA uprating notice, 90 FR 49047; confirms $184,500, the $3,000 domestic and $2,500 election-worker coverage thresholds, and the §230(b) computation. - https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15 — Publication 15 (Circular E) for 2026; confirms 6.2%, base $184,500, Medicare 1.45%. - https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751 and https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/questions-and-answers-for-the-additional-medicare-tax — Additional Medicare Tax 0.9%, filing-status thresholds, $200,000 employer withholding trigger, no employer match. - Statutory text of 26 U.S.C. §§3101, 3111, 3301, 3302, 3306, 275 and 42 U.S.C. §430 via law.cornell.edu. - State authorities read directly: edd.ca.gov; paidfamilyleave.ny.gov/2026; nj.gov/labor rate information; esd.wa.gov 2026 rate release; wacaresfund.wa.gov; mass.gov DFML contribution rates; famli.colorado.gov; paidleave.oregon.gov; dlt.ri.gov press release of 18 Dec 2025; labor.hawaii.gov DCD; labor.alaska.gov 2026 experience rates; pa.gov L&I employee withholding. INFERRED, NOT READ: - The Minnesota Paid Leave 2026 figures (0.88% total, 0.27% family / 0.61% medical, 0.44% employee maximum, 0.66% small-employer rate) come from search results over pl.mn.gov rather than a page I rendered directly — the MN site returned no extractable text. Treat MN as the weakest state line here and re-read before publication. One MN source described the cap as "$185,000"; I have used the OASDI limit of $184,500 as fixed by SSA, since MN caps at the OASDI limit by reference. - The characterisation of §125 cafeteria-plan and §401(k) treatment in the FICA base, the §31(b) excess-withholding credit, and the §3121(b)(19) nonresident-alien student exemption are settled law stated from knowledge; I did not fetch those specific provisions this session. - Washington's employee PFML rate of ≈0.8072% is my arithmetic (1.13% × 71.43%), not a figure ESD publishes as a single percentage. ON THE CONSOLIDATED-TEXT TRAP: I found NO statute-versus-authority conflict in the United States, and that is a real finding rather than a failure to look. The US structure is unusual — the RATES are hard-coded in primary legislation (§3101, §3111, §3301) and are amended only by Act of Congress, while only the CEILING floats, and the ceiling floats by a statutory formula in §230 of the Social Security Act with the annual figure published as an SSA Federal Register notice. Statute and administering authority therefore agree by construction: IRS Publication 15 (2026), SSA's actuarial pages and the underlying Code sections all state 6.2 / 1.45 / 0.9 / 6.0 identically. The nearest thing to a trap is §3301's flat "6 percent", which is literally true yet operationally wrong for every compliant employer because of the §3302 credit — that is documented on the futa scheme rather than treated as a conflict. ON SOURCE STATUS: statutory text was read on law.cornell.edu (Legal Information Institute), a faithful reproduction of the US Code rather than uscode.house.gov itself. Every rate so read is independently corroborated on the administering authority's own current pages (IRS Publication 15, IRS Tax Topic 751, SSA OACT), so confidence remains "primary"; the instrument citations are nonetheless reproduced from LII and section numbers should be spot-checked against uscode.house.gov before publication. No section number or amount in this record was invented — where I could not reach a figure I have said so in "refused" rather than estimated it. I also discarded a Federal Register citation I had guessed at once fetching showed it resolved to an unrelated National Park Service notice; the citation given (90 FR 49047, FR Doc. 2025-19763) is the one I actually loaded and read. Researched against primary instruments and independently challenged by a second verification pass before being served (2026-08-08). Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://usaref.dev/v1/us/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://usaref.dev/v1/us/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://usaref.dev/provenance/us/social-contributions

Other United States series: Federal funds target range (upper bound) · Value added tax · State general sales tax rate · Federal minimum wage (FLSA) · Federal public holidays 2026 · Consumer Price Index (CPI-U), 12-month change · Federal corporate income tax rate · Federal individual income tax brackets (single filer, tax year 2026)