Oregon Paycheck Calculator

Oregon's real tax system includes two mechanisms this calculator's engine genuinely cannot represent, both of which reduce most real filers' actual tax below what this page shows. The first is a $260-per-exemption personal exemption credit — a CREDIT subtracted directly from tax owed after bracket tax is computed, not a deduction subtracted from taxable income before the rate applies, which this engine's single standard-deduction field has no way to model without mischaracterizing the mechanism.

The second is Oregon's federal-tax-liability subtraction, worth up to $8,750, which further reduces Oregon taxable income based on the filer's actual federal tax liability after credits — a figure that depends on each filer's specific federal tax situation and phases out above certain federal AGI levels, far too taxpayer-specific for a single-number-per-filing-status engine to model safely or honestly.

Both omissions push this calculator's Oregon tax figure toward the high side of what a real filer with similar income would actually owe. This is disclosed plainly rather than silently absorbed into the standard deduction or approximated with a guess, consistent with how this calculator handles every other genuine structural gap across the state paycheck series.

Beyond income tax, Oregon runs Paid Leave Oregon, a state-administered paid family and medical leave insurance program funded by a payroll premium on wages. For 2026, the Oregon Employment Department's own rate announcement confirms the total contribution rate holds steady at 1% of wages, split with employees paying 60% (a 0.6% employee share) and employers covering the remaining 40%.

This premium applies up to the same wage base as the federal Social Security tax — $184,500 for 2026 — meaning higher earners see their Paid Leave Oregon contribution cap out at $1,107 for the year ($184,500 × 0.6%), the same pattern of an income-capped payroll deduction seen in similar state programs like California's SDI or New Jersey's UI/Workforce/TDI/FLI premiums, though Oregon's rate and cap mechanics are its own.

This calculator models the employee's 0.6% share as its own separate line, distinct from Oregon's regular unemployment insurance tax (which employers pay entirely and never appears on an employee paycheck), so the paidLeaveOregon figure shown here reflects only what actually comes out of a worker's own pay.

Oregon's steep 9.9% top marginal rate — among the highest of any US state — is best understood alongside the fact that Oregon is also one of only five states with no state sales tax at all. That's a genuine structural trade-off: states that spread revenue collection across both income and sales taxes tend to have comparatively lower marginal income-tax rates, while Oregon leans more heavily on income tax specifically because it forgoes sales tax revenue entirely.

For a wage earner, that trade-off means Oregon's paycheck withholding looks relatively high compared to a similarly-earning worker in a state with both a lower income tax and a sales tax, but Oregon residents also avoid sales tax on every retail purchase, which is a real offsetting factor this paycheck-only calculator does not capture since it only computes payroll withholding, not overall household tax burden across spending.

Anyone comparing an Oregon paycheck to another state's paycheck should keep this structural trade-off in mind — the comparison shown by this calculator captures only the payroll side of each state's very different overall tax philosophy.

High earners who live or work in the Portland metro area face two additional payroll-style income taxes, both genuinely computed by this calculator's portlandLocalTax output once you select the matching option in the 'Portland-area local tax' input above. The Metro Supportive Housing Services (SHS) tax is a 1% tax on taxable income above $128,000 for single filers or $205,000 for joint filers in 2026 (thresholds indexed annually for inflation, per the City of Portland Revenue Division), covering residents of the portions of Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties that fall inside Metro's district, plus non-residents earning Metro-sourced income.

Multnomah County separately runs its own Preschool for All (PFA) tax: 1.5% on county-sourced taxable income above $125,000 for single filers or $200,000 for joint filers, rising to 3% above $250,000 (single) or $400,000 (joint) — both rates scheduled to rise by 0.8 percentage points starting January 1, 2027, and neither threshold indexed for inflation in the meantime, unlike Metro's. Unlike the Metro tax, PFA applies only within Multnomah County itself, not the broader Metro district, so a Washington County resident working in downtown Portland could owe Metro SHS without owing PFA — that's the 'Metro district only' option above. A Multnomah County filer owes both, stacked together, since Multnomah sits entirely inside Metro's boundary — that's the 'Multnomah County' option, which adds Metro's 1% and both of PFA's tiers.

A single filer earning $150,000 while living and working in Multnomah County, for example, genuinely owes both taxes on top of everything else this calculator computes: $220 for Metro SHS (1% of the $22,000 over its $128,000 threshold) plus $375 for Multnomah PFA (1.5% of the $25,000 over its $125,000 threshold, with the additional 1.5% tier not yet reached below $250,000) — $595 total, shown as this page's portlandLocalTax figure once 'Multnomah County' is selected. Portland-metro filers should still treat the statewide stateTax figure as a genuine upper-bound estimate, since Oregon's personal exemption credit and federal-tax-liability subtraction (noted above) are not modeled — that omission works in the opposite direction from the two local taxes, so the two don't simply cancel out.