Privacy Policy

What this site collects, what it does not, and how advertising cookies are handled.

Short version: the calculators run in your browser and nowhere else. The salary you type into the paycheck tool, which it runs against the Social Security taxable maximum, never leaves the machine you typed it on.

Your figures never leave the browser you typed them into

Every calculation here happens in your own browser, in JavaScript that arrives with the page. Nothing you enter is transmitted to a server, logged, or stored on our side. Testing that takes a minute. Open your browser's network tab, run the paycheck calculator, and watch for the request that never goes out, because the IRS bracket table it uses was delivered with the page and has no reason to phone home.

Each calculator carries a "Copy link to this result" button. Press it and the values you entered are encoded into the link itself, so one specific result can go to a spouse or an adviser without either of you retyping anything. Nothing is encoded until you press it. The link never reaches us, but whoever receives it can read your balance and your Roth election straight out of the URL, so treat the link as you would the numbers in it.

Three things are collected, and your figures are in none of them

Analytics. Aggregate traffic measurement, which shows which pages get used and where people arrive from. It records pages viewed, approximate location at country or region level, device type and referring site. It does not record what you type. Nobody can ask the analytics what your balance is, what rate you set, or whether you chose Roth.

Advertising. Display advertising funds the site. Advertising partners, including Google, may set cookies to serve and measure ads, so a partner can learn that a browser loaded a page about IRS contribution limits without learning anything that was entered on it. Google's use of advertising cookies is described in How Google uses information from sites that use its services, and personalised advertising can be turned off at Google Ads Settings.

Server logs. Our host records standard request logs as part of operating the site: IP address, timestamp, page requested, browser string. Every web server writes that file. Ours is not unusual, and what it cannot hold is a wage, because the Social Security and Medicare arithmetic finishes inside your browser and nothing is sent back the other way.

There is no account here, so there is no account data

No account is required, and none is offered. We do not ask for your name, email address, phone number or any financial account details, and there is nowhere on this site to provide them. Your 401(k) or IRA account number has no field to go in. We do not sell data, because we do not hold any worth selling.

The consent notice loads before the advertising tags do

Where required by law, a consent notice appears before advertising or measurement cookies are set, and your choice is applied before those tags load, which is the opposite of the order plenty of sites use.

You can change that choice at any time through the notice itself.

Most rights requests here come down to cookies

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal data held about you, and to object to processing. Here it has little to bite on. There is no account, no mailing list, and no record that you ever ran the Roth comparison, so nearly every request concerns advertising cookies, which are controlled through the settings linked above or by clearing cookies in your browser.

California residents have specific rights under the CCPA, including the right to opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal information as those terms are defined there. We do not sell personal information. Advertising cookies may constitute "sharing" for cross-context behavioural advertising, and the consent notice is how you opt out. What can be shared is that a browser loaded a page about IRS limits. Never a figure typed into one.

Nothing here is aimed at anyone under 13

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. The calculators do take an age and a salary, so a child could type one in; nothing is transmitted or stored when they do, because the calculators run entirely in your browser.

A material change gets written down, not slipped in

If this policy changes materially, the change will be described here, never silently substituted. This page should change far less often than the IRS figures the calculators depend on, which move every autumn.

One address reaches one person

Write to hello@401kscalculator.com. The contact page says what else that address is for, including a wrong IRS figure.