Independent payroll compliance research.
PayrollDetective is an independent research project that builds free calculators and reference content for the people who process payroll, pay payroll taxes, and manage workers comp, and for the workers who live with the results.
The problem
Most payroll content is built to sell you a payroll provider.
The biggest payroll content sites on the internet are owned by payroll providers, brokers, or insurance companies. Their content exists to funnel readers toward their products. The information is rarely wrong, but it is rarely complete. Complete information would expose how often employers overpay their providers, miscalculate workers comp premiums, and miss errors that cost real money. It would also expose how often workers are shorted on overtime, taxed incorrectly on bonuses, or paid under the wrong classification.
PayrollDetective exists in the gap. We do not sell payroll services and we do not sell workers comp. We build tools that find the errors a vendor funded site has no incentive to flag.
The approach
Calculators, not opinions.
Every tool on this site does one thing. It takes specific inputs and returns a specific answer. No general advice. No "consult a professional" boilerplate where a calculation should be. When a tool cannot answer a question, because the rules depend on state specific factors, individual circumstances, or facts the tool cannot verify, it says so directly and points to the next step.
The site is structured around questions employers and workers actually search for. How is overtime calculated. What does my workers comp class code mean. Why did my SUTA rate change. What do my W-2 box codes mean. Each question gets a real answer, often with a tool to confirm the answer applies to your situation.
Four commitments
What this site will and will not do.
01
We will tell you when a calculation depends on something we cannot verify.
The IRS, the Department of Labor, and 50 state agencies each have rules that change. We label every tool with what it can answer cleanly and what it cannot.
02
We will not recommend products we have no business recommending.
When this site links to a service such as a payroll provider, tax filing tool, or training program, we will say so plainly. We earn commissions on some of those links. We will not place a link unless we believe the service is the right answer to a real question the reader is asking.
03
We will publish corrections when we are wrong.
Payroll rules change. Sometimes we will get something wrong. When that happens, we will fix the page, note what changed, and update the "Last reviewed" date.
04
We will not collect personal information we do not need.
Tools that capture an email address say so before they ask. We do not share email lists. We do not sell data. We do not require an account to use any tool on this site.
Editorial standards
How we research and write.
We work from primary sources first, review high impact pages on a regular cadence, and publish corrections when a page is wrong. Our full source hierarchy, review schedule, and corrections process are documented on a dedicated page.
Last reviewed: May 26, 2026.