About WithholdRight

WithholdRight is an independent informational website dedicated to one specific and underserved corner of U.S. tax law: what happens to payroll tax withholding when an employee lives in one state and works — remotely or in an office — for an employer in another. We publish a free multi-state withholding calculator and a library of in-depth articles covering reciprocity, the convenience of the employer rule, employer nexus, state unemployment insurance, state-specific guides, and special situations like the 183-day residency test.

Why We Built This Site

Remote work broke multi-state payroll. Before 2020, the question of which state's income tax should be withheld from a paycheck was usually straightforward: you lived in one state, your office was in the same state, and one state's tax showed up on your W-2. Even then, cross-border commuters had to navigate reciprocity agreements, but the universe of affected workers was relatively small.

Then roughly 37 million Americans began working remotely at least part of the time, and a meaningful share of them began working for employers located in a different state from where they lived. Almost overnight, payroll departments were wrestling with questions they had never faced before: Does hiring an employee in Texas create nexus for a New York employer? If a Virginia resident works remotely for a Maryland employer, which state gets the income tax? What happens to New York's convenience rule when the employee never sets foot in New York?

The major paycheck calculators — built for a single-state world — did not catch up. They continue to miss reciprocity, mishandle the convenience rule, ignore local taxes, and apply SUI to the wrong state. Workers end up over-withheld and waiting for refunds, or under-withheld and facing penalties at filing time. Employers end up registering in the wrong states, paying SUI to the wrong agency, and triggering audits.

WithholdRight exists to fix this. We built a calculator that handles the multi-state logic correctly, and we wrote a library of articles that explains the rules in plain English, with the same depth and rigor you would expect from a professional payroll reference. We give it away for free, supported by display advertising, because the alternative — paying a payroll provider for the same guidance — locks out the people who need it most.

What Makes Us Different

Several things, taken together, distinguish WithholdRight from the generic "tax calculator" sites that crowd the search results:

1. We handle multi-state logic, not just single-state.

Our calculator's first job is to determine the withholding scenario: same-state, reciprocity, convenience rule, multi-state with credit, or no-tax state. Each scenario has its own logic, and we apply the right one based on the residence state, work state, and work arrangement you select. Generic calculators skip this step entirely.

2. Our data comes from primary sources.

Every federal bracket, every state rate, every standard deduction, every reciprocity form on this site traces back to a specific primary source — an IRS Revenue Procedure, a Social Security Administration announcement, a state Department of Revenue publication, or a state reciprocity statute. We cross-verify against the Tax Foundation and the American Payroll Association, but we never publish a number unless we have seen it in a primary source.

3. Our content is reviewed by credentialed professionals.

Every article, every calculator update, and every methodology change is reviewed by a credentialed CPA or Enrolled Agent before publication. Our reviewers' credentials and brief biographies are on our team page. This is not a formality: reviewers have caught errors, requested additional citations, and pushed back on conclusions. We incorporated every change before publishing.

4. We do not scrape, rewrite, or repurpose other sites' content.

Every word on this site is original. We do not run "rewrite" tools over competitor articles. We do not scrape RSS feeds. We do not republish press releases. We do not let AI generate articles without a human writer and a human reviewer. Our content is written from primary sources and our own analysis, by writers who understand tax law, and it is reviewed by tax professionals before it goes live.

5. We publish a methodology page.

Most calculator sites treat their calculation logic as a trade secret. We treat ours as a feature: you can read, on our methodology page, exactly how the calculator handles each scenario, what assumptions it makes, and what it does not model. If you disagree with our methodology, you can replicate our numbers and verify them — or write to us and we will consider your point.

6. We date-stamp everything.

Every article shows a "Last reviewed" date and an "Effective for tax year" date. Tax law changes; we update our content when it does. If you find an article that has not been reviewed in the last 12 months, please let us know — that is a bug, not a feature.

Who We Serve

WithholdRight is built for three audiences:

• Remote employees who live in one state and work for an employer in another, and who need to understand why their withholding looks the way it does, whether they are over- or under-withheld, and what to do about it.
• HR, finance, and operations teams at companies with multi-state remote employees, who need to understand employer nexus, state registration, SUI, and the operational side of multi-state payroll.
• Tax professionals — CPAs, EAs, payroll specialists, and tax attorneys — who want a reliable, primary-source-cited reference for client questions about multi-state withholding.

If you do not fit any of these categories, you are still welcome here. The calculator is free and the articles are open. We just want you to know who we had in mind when we wrote them.

Our Editorial Standards

Our editorial standards are described in detail on our Editorial Policy page. The short version: we publish only original content, written by named writers with subject-matter expertise, reviewed by credentialed tax professionals, sourced from primary documents, and dated. We correct errors promptly and transparently. We do not accept payment for editorial coverage.

Our Funding Model

WithholdRight is funded by display advertising, primarily through Google AdSense. We do not charge users. We do not sell user data. We do not have affiliate links at the time of this writing; if we add them in the future, we will disclose them clearly on the affected pages and on our Advertising Disclosure page.

Our editorial content is independent of our advertising. Advertisers cannot request, edit, or suppress editorial coverage. Reviewers and writers do not know which advertisers, if any, will appear alongside their work.

Our History

WithholdRight was founded in 2026 by a small team of writers, tax professionals, and software engineers who had personally experienced the confusion of multi-state withholding — both as remote employees and as the people running payroll for distributed teams. We are based in the United States and operate the site at 1an.site. We are not affiliated with the IRS, any state Department of Revenue, the Tax Foundation, the American Payroll Association, or any payroll provider.

Contact Us

We answer email. If you have a question about an article, a correction, a feature request, or a question about our advertising or privacy practices, write to us at contact@1an.site. We aim to respond within 5 business days. For media or partnership inquiries, please use the same address and put "Press" or "Partnership" in the subject line.

If you are a tax professional interested in contributing to the Site — as a writer, reviewer, or source — we would like to hear from you. Please write to us with your credentials, your areas of expertise, and a writing sample or two.