Illinois Paystub Generator

Reading an Illinois pay stub, line by line

An Illinois pay stub has exactly four involuntary deductions, and the state one is a single flat rate that the Illinois Constitution forbids from ever becoming graduated. Here is what each line means in 2026:

IL State Income Tax ("IL SIT", "Illinois Withholding"). Illinois taxes wages at a flat 4.95% — the same rate since July 2017 — after a $2,925 exemption for each allowance you claim on Line 1 of Form IL-W-4 (2026 amount; it was $2,850 in 2025). Employees 65 or older or legally blind get another $1,000 per Line 2 allowance. The Department of Revenue's formula is simple enough to check on a calculator: 4.95% × (wages − allowances ÷ pay periods). IDOR's own worked example: $800 a week with two basic and two additional allowances → $32.13 withheld. Because it's flat, a raise never pushes you into a higher state bracket — Article IX, §3 of the state constitution requires a "non-graduated rate".

What you will NOT see: a Chicago or Cook County income tax (Illinois home-rule cities have no power to tax income — Chicago's 22-item tax list contains none), state disability insurance, a paid-family-leave premium (Illinois is not among the 13 states with a payroll-funded program; the Paid Leave for All Workers Act is employer-provided time off), or an unemployment deduction — 820 ILCS 405/1600 voids any wage deduction an employer takes to fund UI.

Plus the federal lines on every US stub: federal income tax, Social Security (6.2% up to $184,500 in 2026), and Medicare (1.45%, plus 0.9% on wages over $200,000). At the state median wage ($51,960), Illinois tax with one allowance is $2,427 a year — about $93 per biweekly check. From January 1, 2027: Social Security 6.2% up to $192,300.

Illinois paycheck facts — 2026

What you actually take home in Illinois (2026 estimates)

Estimated for a single filer taking the standard deduction, including federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Illinois income tax at 4.95% after one $2,925 exemption allowance:

Where the money goes at $60,000: Illinois income tax $2,825 (4.7% of gross) — the whole state bite, since there are no program deductions. Federal income tax and FICA take the other 16%. The flat rate means the state share barely moves as a percentage: 4.6% at $40,000, 4.8% at $100,000.

Chicago vs. the state minimum: a full-time worker at Chicago's $17.05 nets about $3,400 more a year than one at the state's $15.00 in Peoria — and neither pays a city tax, because Illinois has none.

Methodology: 2026 federal brackets and $16,100 standard deduction (IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32), FICA per SSA, Illinois flat 4.95% (Illinois Department of Revenue income tax rate page) after the 2026 $2,925 exemption allowance (Booklet IL-700-T, effective January 1, 2026). Estimates only — your withholding depends on your W-4/IL-W-4 allowances, credits, and pre-tax benefits.

What Illinois jobs pay (BLS, May 2025)

Illinois's median hourly wage across all occupations is $24.98 — a shade above the national median of $24.51. Union density shows in the trades: an Illinois construction laborer's $29.18 median beats California ($28.98) and is $8 an hour more than in North Carolina.

Illinois's workforce in numbers

• 12.7 million residents, civilian labor force of 6.5 million, unemployment 4.9% (Census 2025 estimate; BLS, July 2026 preliminary)
• 1,120,413 self-employed (nonemployer) businesses (Census, 2023) — 3.7% of all US nonemployers, 933,599 of them sole proprietors with no employer pay stub
• 5.7 million people on employer payrolls at 322,415 establishments — 57% of which have fewer than five employees — earning $410 billion a year (Census County Business Patterns, 2023)
• Mean annual wage: $71,130 (BLS OEWS, May 2025)

Illinois pay rules — the answers people actually need

Final paycheck: next regular payday, whether you quit or were fired — and it must include earned, unused vacation. The Wage Payment and Collection Act (820 ILCS 115/5) says final compensation is due at separation if possible and in no case later than the next regularly scheduled payday; the Department of Labor's FAQ lists "bonus payments, vacation pay, wages and commissions" as all part of it. Severance and sick-pay balances are owed only if a contract or policy promises them.

Pay frequency: at least semimonthly, with wages paid no later than 13 days after the pay period ends (820 ILCS 115/3). Executive, administrative, and professional employees — and commissions — may be paid monthly.

Is a pay stub required? Yes, by statute. Since January 1, 2025 (Public Act 103-0953), every Illinois employer must give a pay stub each pay period showing hours worked, pay rates, overtime pay, and deductions, and must keep copies for three years — with a right for current and former employees to request copies. Before that, the law required only an itemized statement of deductions. If you've lost old stubs for a mortgage or lease application, your employer is obligated to have them.

Deductions need your written consent unless required by law or a collective bargaining agreement. Wage claims go to the IDOL Fair Labor Standards Division.

Three minimum wages in one metro: Illinois, Cook County, Chicago (2026)

Illinois reached $15.00 on January 1, 2025 — the seventh and final step of the 2019 law — and nothing further is scheduled at the state level. But two local ordinances keep climbing every July 1, so the rate depends on which side of a municipal line you work:

Illinois workers under 18 who work fewer than 650 hours a year may be paid $13.00 statewide. Chicago's tipped wage sits at 76% of the full rate under the One Fair Wage Compromise Ordinance and will not move again until July 2028, when tipped workers step up toward the full minimum. Many Cook County suburbs have opted out of the county ordinance, so check the county's current list before assuming $15.40 applies.

None of the three jurisdictions levies an income tax — a Chicago stub carries the same four deductions as one from Springfield.

How Illinois compares with its neighbors (take-home on $60,000, 2026 est.)

Illinois's $2,925 exemption is small next to the standard deductions its neighbors allow, which is why a flat 4.95% ends up costing a $60,000 earner more than Wisconsin's graduated 3.5%–5.3% brackets or Missouri's 4.7% top rate. Residents of Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, and Wisconsin who work in Illinois are covered by reciprocal agreements: file Form IL-W-5-NR and the Illinois line is replaced by home-state withholding.

FAQ

How Illinois taxes your wages (2026)

Illinois taxes wages at a flat 4.95%, and no Illinois city or county — Chicago included — levies an income tax on top of it.

Illinois levies a flat 4.95% income tax on wages under the Illinois Income Tax Act (35 ILCS 5/201). The flat rate is constitutionally entrenched: Article IX, Section 3 of the Illinois Constitution requires any income tax to be imposed at a single, non-graduated rate, and the 2020 ballot measure that would have permitted a graduated tax was rejected. So unlike New York or California, an Illinois raise is taxed at the same state rate as the first dollar.

What the flat rate does not mean is that the base is flat. Illinois allows a personal exemption allowance per taxpayer and per dependent, claimed on Form IL-W-4; the amount is set each year and is indexed, so it should be read off the current year's IL-700 withholding tables rather than assumed. Illinois also does not tax retirement income, which is why an Illinois stub and an Illinois tax return can diverge more than you would expect from a flat rate.

What you should never see on an Illinois stub: an employee unemployment insurance deduction — Illinois UI is employer-funded — and no state disability or paid family leave premium, because Illinois runs neither programme.

Illinois pay-stub and pay-frequency law

Is a pay stub required in Illinois?

820 ILCS 115/10 requires the employer to furnish each employee with an itemised statement of deductions made from wages for each pay period. The Wage Payment and Collection Act was amended with effect from 1 January 2025 to go considerably further: employers must now keep copies of pay stubs for at least three years, must furnish copies to an employee on request (up to twice in a twelve-month period), and must provide the last year's stubs to a former employee who asks, for up to a year after separation. An employer that issues stubs electronically must make them accessible to the employee for the full retention period.

That former-employee right is the practically useful one: in most states a departed worker has no statutory route to a missing stub, and in Illinois they do.

How often must you be paid in Illinois?

820 ILCS 115/3 requires wages to be paid at least semi-monthly for most employees, with the wages of a pay period paid no later than thirteen days after the end of that period. Employees paid weekly must be paid within seven days. Executive, administrative and professional employees — those meeting the federal exemption tests — may be paid monthly. Commissions may be paid monthly.

City and local taxes in Illinois

No Illinois city or county levies an income or earnings tax — Chicago included. This surprises people who assume a city of Chicago's size must run something like the New York City or Philadelphia wage tax. It does not: Chicago's employer "head tax" was phased out and abolished in 2014, and nothing replaced it on the employee side. The local tax row simply does not exist on an Illinois stub, in Chicago or anywhere else in the state.

What does vary locally is the wage floor. The Illinois state minimum wage reached $15.00 an hour on 1 January 2025 under 820 ILCS 105, the final step of the 2019 schedule. Chicago and Cook County set their own higher minimum wages by ordinance, on a July rather than January cycle, so a Chicago stub spanning 1 July can carry two hourly rates — read the current rate off the city's own notice rather than the state's.

A Illinois pay stub, worked through line by line

A $64,000 salary paid every two weeks, a single filer in Illinois, with $140 of pre-tax deductions per period.

There is no local row, because no Illinois municipality taxes wages. The state line is the flat 4.95% applied to compensation after pre-tax deductions.

Every figure in this table is computed by PayStubGo's own 2026 tax engine from the inputs stated above — none of it is typed in by hand, and a build check re-runs the same inputs through the same engine and fails if a published figure and a freshly computed one disagree. It is an estimate of withholding, not a statement of your final liability: your own W-4 and state certificate, credits and pre-tax benefits all move the result.

Terms on a Illinois stub, and where to go next

The lines that vary most by state on a Illinois stub, defined in full on the pay stub glossary:

• state income tax — the term as it appears on the stub
• local municipal tax — the term as it appears on the stub
• state withholding certificate — the term as it appears on the stub
• state unemployment insurance — the term as it appears on the stub

Related reading:

• The pay stub glossary — Ninety-four terms, each with where it appears on the stub.
• Build a pay stub — Enter your own figures and see the earnings, deduction and year-to-date lines laid out.
• Holiday season pay — How holidays, overtime and a second seasonal job change the December stub.
• Every state — The state index, for comparing withholding across a move.

Dated figures on this page

Tax rules change every year. Each figure below carries the year or edition it applies to and the official body it came from, so you can check it rather than trust it. Last re-verified 2026-09-20.

Where a rate is set fresh each year and we could not verify the 2026 figure against the issuing agency, the rule is stated and the number is deliberately left out rather than approximated.