Louisiana Paystub Generator

Reading a Louisiana pay stub, line by line

A Louisiana pay stub has exactly one state line: a flat 3% income tax. No brackets, no city or parish tax, no disability or family-leave deduction, and no unemployment contribution from you — the rest of the stub is federal. Here is what each line means in 2026:

LA State Income Tax ("LA State Tax", "LA W/H"). Louisiana taxes all taxable income at a flat 3% — Act 11 of the 2024 Third Extraordinary Session repealed the old 1.85% / 3.5% / 4.25% brackets starting with tax year 2025, and the state constitution caps the rate at 4.75% (Art. VII §4(A)). Your employer takes the tax from wages after the per-period share of the 2026 standard deduction: $12,875 for single filers and married filing separately, $25,750 for joint, head-of-household, and qualifying-surviving-spouse filers — the first inflation-indexed amounts, up from $12,500 / $25,000 in 2025. There are no personal or dependent exemptions any more; Act 11 repealed them.

Why the line is a touch higher than 3%. The Department of Revenue's 2026 withholding booklet (R-1306) uses a 3.09% rate — 3% plus a 0.09% "cushion" so fewer taxpayers owe a balance in May. Your stub shows tax calculated as (wages − standard deduction ÷ pay periods) × 3.09%; LDR's own example is a $700 weekly earner claiming "1": (700 − 247.60) × 0.0309 = $13.98. The extra 0.09% comes back as a refund when you file.

Form L-4 (R-1300) controls the deduction. Block A is a single choice: 0 (no standard deduction — suggested for two-earner households or multiple jobs), 1 (single / married filing separately), or 2 (joint, head of household, qualifying surviving spouse). Line 7 adds or subtracts a flat dollar amount per check. If you never file an L-4, your employer must withhold with no standard deduction at all — the full 3.09% on every dollar.

What you will NOT see in 2026: a city or parish income tax (the constitution, Art. VII §4(C), bars every political subdivision from levying one); a "LA SUI" line (unemployment insurance is employer-only — R.S. 23:1531 says contributions "shall not be deducted, in whole or in part, from the wages"; the 2026 employer wage base is $7,000); or any state disability or paid-family-leave line, because Louisiana has no such programs. Bonuses and commissions run through the same 3.09% formula as far as we can tell: the 2026 booklet contains only that formula and no separate supplemental rate. We checked the booklet and nothing else, so if LDR has published supplemental-wage guidance elsewhere we have not seen it.

Plus the federal lines on every US stub: federal income tax per your W-4, Social Security (6.2% up to $184,500 in 2026), and Medicare (1.45%, plus 0.9% on wages over $200,000).

Louisiana paycheck facts — 2026

What you actually take home in Louisiana (2026 estimates)

Estimated for a single filer taking the standard deduction, including federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Louisiana state tax at the statutory 3% after the $12,875 standard deduction. No local tax and no state program deductions exist in Louisiana, so nothing else is subtracted. Your stub withholds at 3.09%, so the state line on a real check runs about 3% higher than the state figure here — the difference comes back as a refund:

Where the money goes at $60,000: Louisiana state tax is $1,414 — 2.4% of gross — because the first $12,875 carries no state tax and everything above it is taxed at one 3% rate. Your stub actually withholds about $1,456 at the 3.09% cushion rate ($56 per biweekly check), so roughly $42 comes back at filing. Federal income tax ($5,020) and FICA ($4,590) take the other 16%.

Skip the L-4 and the number changes: an employee who never files Form L-4 is withheld at 3.09% on every dollar — $1,854 a year at $60,000, about $398 more than someone who claimed "1" in Block A. The overpayment is refunded, but only after you file.

Methodology: 2026 federal brackets and $16,100 standard deduction (IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32), FICA per SSA, Louisiana flat 3% under R.S. 47:32 as amended by Act 11 (2024 3rd Ex. Sess.) after the 2026 standard deduction of $12,875 (LDR R-1306, rev. 1/26). Withholding on an actual stub uses 3.09% (RIB 25-012). Estimates only — your withholding depends on your W-4/L-4, pre-tax benefits, and credits.

What Louisiana jobs pay (BLS, May 2025)

Louisiana's median hourly wage across all occupations is $21.89 — 11% below the national median of $24.51 — and the mean annual wage is $56,600 against $69,770 nationally. The median Louisiana waiter earns exactly $7.25 an hour with tips counted, $15,080 a year — the only one of the eight benchmark jobs sitting on the legal minimum. The flat tax softens the gap at the top: a software developer at the state median ($102,800) pays about $2,698 in Louisiana state tax, with no local tax on top.

Louisiana's workforce in numbers

• 4.6 million residents, civilian labor force of 2.1 million, unemployment 4.4% (Census 2025 estimate; BLS, July 2026 preliminary)
• 418,516 self-employed (nonemployer) businesses (Census, 2023) — about one for every 11 residents, and 3.9 times the number of businesses with employees
• 1.7 million people on employer payrolls at 108,561 establishments, earning $96.6 billion a year (Census County Business Patterns, 2023)
• Mean annual wage: $56,600 (BLS OEWS, May 2025)

Louisiana pay rules — the answers people actually need

Final paycheck: next regular payday or 15 days after separation, whichever comes first — the same deadline whether you quit or were fired. R.S. 23:631 sets one clock for discharge (§631(A)(1)(a)) and one for resignation (§631(A)(1)(b)), and they are identical. Payment is made the way you were normally paid, or by mail to your address on file (mailing counts as payment when posted). Accrued, unused vacation is "wages" and must be paid (§631(D)); commissions and incentive pay are included unless a written policy says otherwise, and bonus calculations may take up to 120 days. If part of the amount is disputed, the undisputed part is still due on time.

The penalty for a late final check is steep. Under R.S. 23:632, an employer that ignores your written demand owes up to 90 days' wages at your daily rate (or full wages from the demand until payment, whichever is less) plus attorney's fees on a well-founded suit filed three days or more after the demand. A good-faith dispute limits that to the amount owed plus judicial interest. Claims go to state court — the Louisiana Workforce Commission does not adjudicate wage claims.

Pay frequency: whatever your employer designates — and if it doesn't, the 1st and 16th. R.S. 23:633(A) requires every employer to tell you at hire the wage, the payment method, and the frequency. Manufacturing, oil-boring and mining employers with 10 or more employees, and public-service corporations must pay at least twice a month, two weeks apart, with everything earned paid by the payday closing the next payroll period (§633(B)). Executive, administrative, supervisory, professional, and FLSA-exempt employees are outside these rules. Violations cost $25–$250 per day, and repeat offenders face a minimum 10 days in jail.

Is a pay stub required? No. The Wage Payment Act (R.S. 23:631–640) has no itemized-statement or pay-stub requirement — not even on request. The only related duty is the at-hire disclosure of your rate, method, and payday in §633(A), plus the posted LWC notice of your right to timely payment. Federal law adds only employer record-keeping (29 CFR Part 516). Sites claiming Louisiana mandates itemized stubs are reading a rule that is not in the statute — which is exactly why keeping your own copy of each stub matters.

Minimum wage: $7.25, the federal floor. Louisiana is one of five states with no minimum-wage law at all, so FLSA-covered employers pay the federal $7.25, with a $2.13 cash wage for tipped staff (maximum tip credit $5.12). No increase is scheduled; a change needs Congress or the Legislature, and minimum-wage bills filed in most regular sessions have not passed.

City and parish rules: no local income tax, no local minimum wage

Louisiana is one of the few states where the answer is the same in every city and parish. No political subdivision may levy an income tax — La. Const. Art. VII §4(C) reads: "A political subdivision of the state shall not levy a severance tax, income tax, inheritance tax, or tax on motor fuel." New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lafayette, and Lake Charles fund themselves with sales and property taxes, never a wage line on your stub, and there is no employer-side local payroll tax either.

Minimum wage is equally uniform. R.S. 23:642(B) forbids any local governmental subdivision from setting "a minimum wage rate" or a mandatory minimum number of vacation or sick days for private employers (Acts 1997 No. 317; 2012 No. 667). So a full-time minimum-wage job grosses $15,080 in New Orleans exactly as it does in Monroe — and a tipped server's cash wage is $2.13 statewide.

Unemployment insurance is the one payroll tax that varies by employer — rates run 0.09% to 6.20% on a $7,000 wage base in 2026 (down from $7,700 in 2025) — but R.S. 23:1531 makes it illegal to take any of it out of your pay.

Louisiana vs. its neighbors (plus Alabama and Tennessee for a Gulf-South comparison)

Louisiana shares a land border with only three states, so Alabama and Tennessee are added as the next-closest comparisons. At $60,000 a Louisiana single filer pays about $1,414 in state tax — the whole gap between Louisiana and no-income-tax Texas or Tennessee — and nothing to a city or parish, which is what keeps the state's total bite among the lowest of the income-tax states. The $12,875 standard deduction is the lever: it shields more than a fifth of a $60,000 salary before the 3% rate touches anything.

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