Payslip Checker Are you actually being taxed correctly?

Every Irish payslip separates gross pay from three statutory deductions: income tax (shown as PAYE), the Universal Social Charge (USC) and Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI). Anything else, a pension contribution, bike-to-work, a salary sacrifice, is separate and does not belong in the three boxes above.

Why one payslip is not enough (for PAYE and USC)

PAYE and USC are charged on the cumulative basis. At each pay date your employer works out the tax due on everything you have earned since 1 January, against that same proportion of your annual tax credits and standard rate cut-off, then deducts whatever has already been taken. So the tax on any single payslip is a balancing figure for the whole year to date, not a twelfth of your annual bill.

That is why a month with a bonus takes a lot of tax and the months after it take noticeably less. Both are correct. It is also why annualising one payslip and comparing it to a calculator gives the wrong answer, and why this page asks for your year-to-date totals: with them, we reproduce your employer's own arithmetic exactly instead of estimating it.

PRSI is different. It is not cumulative: each period is charged on that period's earnings alone, with no reference to the rest of the year. That makes PRSI the one line that can be verified from a single payslip, which is why we check it even when you leave the year-to-date boxes blank.

Which figure goes in which box

Use taxable pay, not "total pay". Notional pay (benefit in kind, such as employer-paid health insurance) is taxable and must be included, even though it is not cash you receive. Non-taxable items, such as the small remote-working allowance often marked NT, must be excluded. A line labelled "Total Pay Excl Notional" is neither of those things: it leaves the BIK out and the non-taxable allowance in, so entering it produces a wrong answer.

The most common causes

Emergency tax. If Revenue has no up-to-date Revenue Payroll Notification for your job, your employer must tax you on the emergency basis, which charges the higher rate on nearly all of your pay. It is the single most expensive payroll error and the easiest to fix: register the employment in myAccount and the overpayment comes back.

A split rate band. If you have two jobs, or recently changed jobs, part of your standard rate cut-off may still be allocated to the old employment. You then pay 40% on income that should be taxed at 20%.

Unclaimed credits. Rent tax credit, medical expenses, tuition fees and the home carer credit all have to be claimed. An unclaimed credit is not an error by your employer, but it is money you are entitled to and can be backdated four years.

If you have overpaid

You can reclaim overpaid PAYE for the last four tax years yourself, through myAccount, for free. Agencies will do it for a percentage of the refund; nothing they do is unavailable to you directly.