FICA in 2026: Social Security & Medicare Withholding Explained

What FICA is — the 7.65% split

FICA — the Federal Insurance Contributions Act — is the payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare. It is the second-biggest bite out of most paychecks after federal income tax, and unlike income tax it has no deductions, brackets, or credits to soften it: it comes off your gross wages from the first dollar.

For an employee, FICA is two taxes bundled into one line:

Rates, wage base, and thresholds from data/tax-2026.md (§3), sourced to the SSA 2026 COLA fact sheet and IRS Topic 751.

So on the first $184,500 of wages, an employee pays a flat 7.65% (6.2% + 1.45%). The two halves diverge only at higher incomes — Social Security stops, Medicare keeps going, and a surtax kicks in — which is what the rest of this guide unpacks.

Social Security: 6.2% and the wage base

The Social Security tax is 6.2% of your wages, but only up to an annual ceiling called the wage base (or "taxable maximum"). For 2026 that ceiling is $184,500, up from $176,100 in 2025 — the SSA raises it most years to track wage growth.

Two consequences follow from the cap:

• There is a maximum Social Security tax. The most any single employee can pay in 2026 is 6.2% × $184,500 = $11,439. Earn a dollar more than $184,500 and that dollar owes no Social Security tax at all.
• High earners get a mid-year "raise." If your salary exceeds $184,500, your paychecks late in the year get slightly larger once you've hit the cap and the 6.2% stops — a small but real bump that resets every January.

Because Social Security stops at the wage base, it is a regressive tax as a share of total income: someone earning $184,500 pays the full 6.2% on all of it, while someone earning $1 million pays 6.2% on only the first $184,500, an effective Social Security rate near 1.1% of their total pay.

Medicare: 1.45% uncapped + the 0.9% surtax

Medicare works the opposite way. The base Medicare tax is 1.45% of wages with no cap — it applies to every dollar you earn, whether that's $30,000 or $3 million.

On top of that, high earners owe an Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% on wages above a threshold:

• $200,000 for single filers,
• $250,000 for married filing jointly.

The surtax applies only to the wages above the threshold, not your whole income — just like a tax bracket. One quirk trips people up: your employer withholds the extra 0.9% on any wages over $200,000 regardless of your filing status, because payroll doesn't know your spouse's income. A married couple can end up over- or under-withheld on the surtax and settle up on their return. The Additional Medicare Tax is also the one piece of FICA the employer does not match — the employee pays it alone.

The employer match

The 7.65% on your pay stub is only half the story. Your employer pays a matching 7.65% out of its own pocket: 6.2% Social Security (to the same $184,500 wage base) plus 1.45% Medicare. So the government actually collects 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare on your wages — 15.3% combined — split evenly between you and your employer.

The single exception is the 0.9% Additional Medicare surtax on high earners: that is paid by the employee only and is not matched. Economists generally argue the employer's half is effectively borne by the worker anyway in the form of lower wages, which is exactly why the self-employed — who have no separate employer — pay both halves themselves.

Self-employment: paying both halves

When you're self-employed, you are the employer and the employee, so you owe both sides of FICA. This is called SECA (Self-Employment Contributions Act), or simply self-employment tax:

• Social Security: 12.4% (both halves) on net self-employment earnings up to the $184,500 wage base — a maximum of 12.4% × $184,500 = $22,878.
• Medicare: 2.9% (both halves) on all net earnings, uncapped.
• Combined: 15.3% self-employment tax, plus the 0.9% Additional Medicare surtax above $200,000 single / $250,000 married.

Two softeners exist, and here honesty matters. Self-employment tax is calculated on your net self-employment earnings (not gross revenue), and you may deduct half of the self-employment tax against your income tax — roughly mirroring the fact that an employer's share isn't taxable to an employee. The exact net-earnings adjustment percentage and the one-half-of-SE-tax deduction are IRS calculation mechanics that are not contained in Reckix's 2026 rate dataset (which covers rates, the wage base, and thresholds) — see data note; confirm the current-year figures with IRS Schedule SE.

Worked example: $220,000 single earner

Put every rule together for a single employee earning $220,000 in 2026 — high enough to hit the Social Security cap and cross the Medicare surtax threshold:

All rates, the $184,500 wage base, and the $200,000 surtax threshold are from data/tax-2026.md (§3). Amounts are those rates applied to $220,000.

The details that matter: Social Security stops at $11,439 no matter how far above $184,500 this earner goes; Medicare keeps taxing all $220,000; and only the $20,000 above $200,000 draws the 0.9% surtax, adding $180. The employer matches everything except that $180. Between the two of them, the government collects $14,809 + $14,629 = $29,438 in FICA on this one salary — a number most employees never see, because half of it never appears on their pay stub.

For a lower earner it's simpler: at $90,000, well under every threshold, FICA is a flat 7.65% — $5,580 Social Security + $1,305 Medicare = $6,885, matched dollar for dollar by the employer.

Methodology & sources

Every rate and threshold in this guide — Social Security 6.2% (employee) / 12.4% (self-employed), the 2026 wage base of $184,500, Medicare 1.45% / 2.9% uncapped, and the 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax at $200,000 single / $250,000 married — is drawn from Reckix's 2026 tax dataset (data/tax-2026.md, §3), which cites the Social Security Administration's 2026 COLA fact sheet, the SSA contribution and benefit base, and IRS Topic 751. The worked figures ($11,439 max Social Security, $22,878 max self-employment Social Security, and the $220,000 example) are those official rates applied arithmetically. Where a self-employment calculation detail (the net-earnings base adjustment and the one-half-of-SE-tax deduction) falls outside the rate dataset, it is described as a mechanism and flagged rather than assigned an invented number — confirm those on IRS Schedule SE. All figures are data as of July 2026 for tax year 2026. FICA does not vary by state; the paycheck calculator applies these same figures in every state.