A pay stub is a one-page record of a single pay period. It states what was earned, what was taken out, and what was paid — and it ties those three numbers together so a reader can check the arithmetic without asking anyone for permission. That is the whole document. The confusion around it comes from people asking it to do jobs it was never built for.
The four blocks a stub always contains
- Who is making the claim. Employer name (often address), employee name, job title.
- Which period it covers. A start date, an end date, and a separate pay date. The last of those three is not decoration: on any normal cycle the money is due after the period closes, so the dates genuinely differ.
- Earnings, with the basis. Hours worked and the hourly rate, or the annual salary divided across the year’s periods. The basis is what turns a number into evidence.
- Deductions and totals. One line per deduction, then gross, total deductions and net. See how to read a pay stub line by line for the order in which those blocks should be checked.
What people actually use it for
Three situations account for most of the demand. Proof of income — a landlord or a lender wants to see recent periods, usually two or three consecutive ones.Your own records — checking that what arrived matches what you earned, which is harder after the fact if the document was never itemised. And tax-season housekeeping — a stub is not a tax form, but it is the working paper you reconcile a year against.
Pay stub, payslip, pay statement, paycheck
The first three are the same document under different names; “payslip” is more common in British English, “pay statement” in formal US payroll software, and “pay stub” in everyday American usage. A paycheck is different: it is the payment instruction — the paper you deposit or the direct-deposit entry itself — and it carries the net figure without the itemisation. People who say “I need a copy of my paycheck” are usually asking for the stub, because a check cannot show a deduction breakdown.
What a pay stub cannot prove
This is the part worth reading carefully, because it is where documents get rejected and where expectations go wrong.
- It is not a tax form. Annual wages and withheld tax are reported on a Form W-2 for employees, or a 1099-NEC for contractors you paid. A stub covers one period and is issued by whoever is paying you, not by a government body.
- It does not show what your employer paid. Employer-side Social Security and Medicare contributions, unemployment insurance and most benefit premiums never appear on your stub — they are the employer’s expense, reported by the employer, not deducted from your pay.
- It says nothing about the rest of the year. Unless a stub carries year-to-date columns, it cannot answer “how much have I earned since January”. Many short-form stubs do not carry them, and this generator is one of them — the omission is listed explicitly in the template guide.
- It is not a contract. A stub records one period. It does not establish an hourly rate going forward, an employment relationship, or entitlement to anything.
Who is supposed to issue one
The employer. A pay stub is an output of payroll, produced by whoever runs the payroll — an in-house bookkeeper, a payroll provider, or an employer of record. When a self-employed person needs the same information, there is no employer to ask, which is why the contractor version of this document is a different thing with different obligations attached: an invoice and an income record, not a withholding statement.
Why the arithmetic matters more than the layout
A reader who distrusts a stub almost always tests the same identity: earnings minus deductions equals net. Layout varies wildly between employers; that identity does not. If you are assembling a stub yourself, make the three totals reconcile to the cent, and give every earnings line a basis — the net pay calculation guide walks through both with worked figures. The generator does that addition and subtraction live while you type, so a mismatch is visible before anything is paid for.
And if you are wondering what happens to a file like this after it has been bought — whether it can be opened again next month — the home page questions answer it plainly, including the case where you never entered an email.