South Carolina Paycheck Calculator

South Carolina's legislature passed Act 110, signed into law by the Governor on March 30, 2026, effective for tax years beginning after December 31, 2025 — meaning the entire 2026 tax year, not a future one. Confirmed directly against SC Information Letter #26-20, the South Carolina Department of Revenue's own official guidance dated August 31, 2026.

Act 110 does three things at once: it collapses the old 0%/3%/6% three-bracket schedule into two brackets (1.99% below $30,000, 5.21% above it); it decouples South Carolina's tax base from federal taxable income, shifting the starting point to federal adjusted gross income (AGI) instead; and it replaces the federal-standard-deduction pass-through this calculator previously reused with a new state-specific deduction, the SCIAD.

A useful side effect worth knowing: the legislature's official "5.21% minus $966" phrasing for the upper bracket is mathematically identical to plain two-bracket marginal taxation — 1.99% on the first $30,000, then 5.21% only on the excess — so despite the unusual wording, nothing about how the tax is computed is actually unusual once you work through the arithmetic.

In place of the federal standard deduction, South Carolina now applies its own South Carolina Income Adjusted Deduction (SCIAD) — a base amount that shrinks as income rises rather than staying fixed. A single filer starts at $15,000, a married joint filer at $30,000, both flat up to a first income threshold, then reduced on a straight-line sliding scale until they reach $0 entirely.

For a single filer, that phase-out runs from $40,000 to $95,000 of income; for married filing jointly, from $80,000 to $190,000 — roughly double throughout, which is where the real married-filer tax relief in Act 110 actually comes from, not from a wider bracket threshold. SCDOR's own Information Letter #26-20 specifies the reduction amount is rounded down to the nearest $10, a small mechanical detail this calculator applies exactly.

Since this calculator has no other-income or above-the-line-deduction inputs, it treats gross wages as the income figure SCIAD phases out against — exact for a wage-only filer with no other income, but something to know if a filer also has significant investment or side income that would push their real federal AGI higher than their W-2 wages alone.

South Carolina's Act 110 brackets apply the identical $30,000 threshold to every filing status, unlike most progressive-tax states (and similar to Virginia elsewhere on this site) that roughly double their bracket thresholds for married filing jointly. On the surface that might look like South Carolina gives married filers no extra relief at all, but that's not the case.

The actual married-filer benefit is built into the SCIAD instead: a married couple's $30,000 deduction (versus $15,000 single) doesn't even start phasing out until $80,000 of income, more than double the $40,000 where a single filer's reduction begins. At the same $75,000 household income, a single filer already has a meaningfully reduced SCIAD while a married joint filer still gets the full amount.

This calculator models that correctly: the married configuration uses the identical bracket thresholds as the single configuration, applying South Carolina's own wider SCIAD schedule as the only filing-status difference — exactly how Act 110 actually structures it.

This calculator's South Carolina figures cover federal income tax, South Carolina's Act 110 income tax, and the two federal FICA taxes — the complete set of withholding categories that apply broadly to South Carolina wage earners. South Carolina has no state-run disability insurance or paid-family-leave payroll premium — no Department of Employment and Workforce program of that kind exists as of 2026 — so there's no additional payroll deduction line to model here beyond income tax.

This calculator also does not model South Carolina's $4,930-per-dependent exemption, since it has no dependents input, the same limitation shared by every other state calculator on this site that omits household-size-dependent adjustments. It also treats every filer as a full-year South Carolina resident; Act 110 requires a nonresident to reduce their SCIAD in proportion to how much of their federal AGI is South Carolina-source income, which this calculator has no residency input to represent.

South Carolina does not levy local city or county income taxes on top of the state rate, so aside from the dependent and nonresident-proration gaps above, this calculator's stateTax figure represents a reasonably complete estimate of South Carolina income tax for a full-year resident without dependents.