Summer Associate Salary Tax Rate Forum

[Anonymous User]

What is the Summer Associate salary taxed at? For example, if you do a SA at a New York big law firm at ~$3,900/week, how much do you bring home on that?

[nealric]

https://taxfoundation.org/publications/ ... -brackets/

Add social security and medicare. Don't forget that the amount withheld is not the same thing as your tax. Most SAs will be taking the standard deduction.

[almostperfectt]

Summer associates get taxed like any other income is taxed. So, 10 weeks at 3900 each gives 39,000. Assuming single and simple financials, you subtract 12,550 for standard deduction, so your adjusted gross income is about 26,500. Using 2021 brackets, that would put you in the 12% tax bracket, so 10% on your income up to 9950 and 12% on the rest. About 3k income tax bill total. Add another 7% or so for payroll taxes and maybe another 7% for state/city income tax so another 5500 in tax. I would guess a little less than 10k total taxes (estimating the annoying part of it), so about 30k take home.

But it should be noted that Summer Associates (and interns generally) get boned by tax withholding. Since your weekly pay is so high, the calculations generally assume that you are making that for a full year, and the govt takes its biweekly (or however often you get paid) cut assuming you are in the higher bracket. That means the government thinks you'll be paying something like 20% of your income taxes, so will take that much out of each check. As you see from above, your actual bracket for the summer is closer to 11% so unless you play with the w4 forms and the withholdings they will take like half of the money that is rightfully yours and you get it back when you file your tax return next year.

[Anonymous User]

As a follow-up to the above, you can use the IRS estimator to adjust your W-4 and avoid having too much withheld from your summer associate paychecks: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/tax-wit ... -estimator