Personal Finance & Money Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who want to be financially literate. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
If I were to say that my yearly, gross salary was 50,000 euros, then what would be my monthly net after-tax income?
For example, this calculator looks OK to me: http://calculatenetsalary.com/calculate-net-salary-in-germany.html ... but I'm not sure how accurate it is. (Edit: It isn't very accurate; see one answer below.)
Or, does anyone know a formula to calculate this?
Of course, predicting taxes & Co. is difficult, as it will depend on thousands of things (as you can already guess from the amount of information you have to type into the Spiegel calculator linked by AlexR).
Rough guesses exist.
0th approximation: divide the gross by 2 and be happy if you get more net than this prediction tells you.
If you want a slightly more offical tax calculator than what Spiegel provides you with, the official software for income (and some other) tax declaration, ELSTER(*), does have a prediction based on what you enter.
Keep in mind that in Germany the difference between gross and net is much more than the income tax, as social insurance is calculated and deducted separately.
(*) note that someone at the tax office has humour: Elster = magpie, which in tales/fables is attributed to be thieving...
The website you are looking at is a fake. I found this by feeding into it figures for countries I know about (Canada and UK). Feeding in a gross income of five thousand dollars in Canada it claims you have to pay $1000 in taxes (in fact $5000 is well below the zero-tax threshold). For $10,000 income the taxes are given as exactly double that (obviously wrong for anyone who knows Canada's tax structure). Feeding in similar figures for the UK give similar results. It also gives "0" as the social security contributions in both cases (obviously wrong).
Net salary calculation are more complicated than that website would indicate. For instance your net salary depends on your marital status, and the number of dependants you have. This article will give you some pointers.
I would recommend this calculator to calculate taxes and net salary in Germany, which is very good and which I use very often personally:
Unfortunately, it is available only in German.
I work in Germany and this calculator is extremely accurate, I tested with my own salary:
http://www.german-tax-consultants.com/wage-tax-calculator.htm
€50k a year will leave you €2477.69 net per month
Your net salary depends on many factors, first which tax class you are categorised, for example if you are single most likely you will be in tax class I. If you get married you can choose between lll/IV and IV/lV. This gross-net salary calculator gives you the would be salary for all the tax classes.
This website also looks useful. Not sure how accurate it is though. - http://www.parmentier.de/steuer/wagetax_.htm#
