How a 401k Contribution Affects Your Paycheck

November 26, 2018

How a 401k Contribution Affects Your Paycheck

As you begin a new job, or if you are a longer-term employee who is just starting to make contributions to a 401(k) plan, you are confronted with a question: Do you know how a 401k contribution affects your paycheck? Believe it or not, you could actually increase your bottom line assets by reducing your income through a 401(k) contribution.

Let’s work through an example so that we can more completely understand what happens.

Your New Job

So, you’ve started a new job, with an annual pay of $30,000. We won’t go into all of the details behind a W4 at this point, but for the sake of the example, we’ll say you filed your W4 to exactly match your tax expected of $1,970 for the year (and you started in January). Your state tax is a flat 5%. In addition to this, you have opted to take advantage of your employer’s health insurance plan, which costs $50 per month. You are paid on an every-other-week schedule, for 26 pay periods per year.

This means that your take-home pay amounts to approximately $884.82, which is calculated as follows:

Salary ($30,000/26)	$1,153.85
Federal withholding	$75.76
State withholding	$57.69
FICA & SS	$88.27
Health Insurance	$23.07
Net Pay	$909.06

How a 401k contribution affects your paycheck

So, you now are ready to begin making contributions to your available 401k plan. The company will match your contributions as follows:

100% of the first 2% of contributions

50% of the next 2% of contributions

25% of the next 2% of contributions

If you make a total of 6% in contributions to your 401k, the company will match that with 3.5% contributed to your account. Your 6% of $30,000 will amount to $1,800 per year, and the company match will be an additional $1,050, for a total contribution of $2,850.

For each paycheck, you are making a contribution of 6%, which is $69.23, and the company’s match is an additional $40.38 added to your account. The result in change to your paycheck will work out as follows:

Salary ($30,000/26)	$1,153.85
401k contribution	$69.23
Federal withholding	$67.44
State withholding	$54.23
FICA & SS	$88.27
Health Insurance	$23.07
Net Pay	$851.61

The difference in your final take-home pay is only $57.45, which is $11.78 less than the amount that you contributed to the 401(k) account. This is due to the fact that when you make a contribution to the 401k account, this amount is no longer subject to income tax for this tax year. Your taxable income went down by $1,800 and your tax went down correspondingly.

When you consider what your overall economic result from this new paycheck is, you’ll see that making the 401(k) contribution is, indeed, a no-brainer:

Net pay	$851.61
401k contribution	$69.23
Company match	$40.38
Total economic increase	$961.22

As you can see, the end result is that you actually have increased your overall money on your balance sheet assets by $52.16, which is a 5.73% increase. Plus, you’re paying less income tax to boot! Granted, your 401k account and the company match are restricted in access, but your overall situation is a significant increase.

Keep in mind that, while we used 401k as the example type of account, the same could apply to a 403b, or other sort of tax-deferral account. In addition, keep in mind that your later distributions from the 401k will be subject to ordinary income tax.

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