A pay stub is the receipt for your paycheck. It shows what you earned (gross pay), everything taken out (taxes, insurance, retirement), and what actually landed in your account (net pay). The YTD column is the running total since January.
Your paycheck arrives with most of the money already gone, and the stub is the paper trail that explains where it went. Once you can read it, no deduction is a mystery.
Gross versus net — the two big numbers
Gross pay is what you earned before anything came out: hours times pay rate, plus overtime or bonuses. Net pay — “take-home” — is what is left after every deduction. The gap between them surprises almost everyone the first time they look.
What gets taken out
Federal and state income tax: estimated tax on your earnings, sent in as you go. Social Security and Medicare: often listed as FICA or OASDI — together they take 7.65% of most paychecks (6.2% for Social Security, 1.45% for Medicare). Then your own choices: health insurance premiums, retirement contributions, and things like union dues or garnishments if they apply.
Say you earned $1,000 gross this pay period. Roughly: $76.50 goes to Social Security and Medicare, maybe $100 to federal tax, $40 to state tax, and $35 to health insurance. That leaves around $748 net. Everyone's numbers differ — the point is the stub shows every single line, and each one should make sense.
YTD means year to date
Almost every line has a twin column labeled YTD. It is simply the running total from January 1 to now — handy at tax time and when a lender asks what you make in a year. Landlords and lenders ask for recent stubs because they prove your income better than your word does, so keep them somewhere you can find them.