Pay stub abbreviations

There is no standard set of pay stub abbreviations. No federal law prescribes them, no agency publishes a list, and two employers in the same city can label the same deduction differently.

What the law does say, in the states that say anything, is that coding is allowed but opacity is not. Wisconsin puts both halves in one rule: the employer must state the number of hours worked, the rate of pay and the amount of and reason for each deduction, and a reasonable coding system may be used. California draws the boundary from the other end — an employee is deemed to suffer injury, which is what unlocks the statutory penalty, if the employer fails to provide accurate and complete information and the employee cannot promptly and easily determine from the wage statement alone which deductions were made from gross to arrive at net.

So the codes are legitimate, and a stub you cannot decode is not. What follows is what the common ones mean.

Earnings

These appear above the deductions and add up to gross pay.

Code	What it is
REG, RT, BASE	Regular hours at your base rate
OT, O/T, 1.5	Overtime, normally the base rate multiplied by 1.5
DT, DBL	Double time, where a state rule or a contract provides for it
HOL	Holiday pay
VAC, PTO, FLOAT	Paid time off drawn from a balance
SICK, PSL	Paid sick leave, often shown with an accrued balance beside it
BONUS, BNS	A one-off payment; expect an unusually large federal tax line beside it
COMM	Commission
RETRO	A correction paying the difference owed for an earlier period
SHFT, DIFF	A shift differential for nights, weekends or an undesirable rota
TIPS, TIP CR	Reported tips, and any tip credit taken against the minimum wage
EXP, REIMB	An expense reimbursement, which is not wages and is not taxed as wages

A RETRO line is worth a second look whenever it appears without an explanation, because it is how an underpayment gets fixed quietly. Correcting a pay stub error covers what should accompany one.

Taxes withheld

Code	What it is
FIT, FWT, FED, FED W/H	Federal income tax withholding
OASDI, FICA-SS, SS, SOC SEC	Social Security, 6.2% up to the annual wage base
FICA-MED, MED, MEDI	Medicare, 1.45% with no cap
ADD MED, MED SUR	Additional Medicare, an extra 0.9% above $200,000 of wages in a calendar year
SIT, SWT, ST TAX	State income tax
LOC, CITY, SD, LST	Local, municipal or school district tax
SDI, TDI	State disability insurance, where the state runs one
PFML, FLI, FAMLI	State paid family and medical leave
SUI, SUTA	State unemployment insurance; in most states this is an employer cost

OASDI is the one that most often prompts the search. It stands for Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, which is the formal name of the Social Security programme, and it is the same 6.2% line as FICA-SS on a different employer's stub. If it vanishes in the autumn, you have crossed the wage base for the year rather than lost a benefit.

The state rows vary enormously, and whether they exist at all is a state question — the state requirement pages carry the rule and the source for each one.

Benefit deductions

Code	What it is
MED, DEN, VIS	Health, dental and vision premiums, usually through a cafeteria plan
125, SEC125, CAF, PRE-TAX	A deduction taken under a section 125 cafeteria plan
FSA, HCFSA, DCFSA	Flexible spending arrangement, for health or for dependent care
HSA	Health savings account contribution
401K, 403B, 457	A traditional retirement deferral
ROTH, R401K	A designated Roth contribution
STD, LTD	Short and long-term disability premiums
GTL, GTLI, IMP, IMPINC	Group-term life insurance imputed income — see below, it is not a fee
ESPP	Employee stock purchase plan contribution
LOAN, ADV, ADVANCE	Repayment of a payroll advance or a plan loan
UD, DUES	Union dues
GARN, LEVY, CHSUP, CS	A garnishment, a tax levy or a child support order

Whether a given line comes out before or after tax — and before which tax — is the part that changes your net, and the mechanics are set out in how to read a pay stub, which carries the table of what each family reduces. The short version people get wrong: a traditional 401K deferral lowers the wages your income tax is figured on, but the Internal Revenue Code puts employer contributions under a qualified cash or deferred arrangement, and designated Roth contributions, back into wages for Social Security and Medicare. Your retirement deferral does not reduce FICA.

For the GARN family, the limits on how much may be taken, and the order in which competing orders are applied, are in pay stub deductions explained.

The prefixes: ER, EE and YTD

Three prefixes carry more meaning than any single code.

EE marks the employee share and ER the employer share. An ER MED or ER 401K line is money your employer paid on top of your wages. It is shown for information, it is not subtracted from your net, and adding it to your deductions total is the single most common misreading of a stub.

YTD is year-to-date: the running total since 1 January for that same line. These columns are what make a stub usable as proof of income, and they are also your best self-check, since each one should advance by exactly the current-period figure beside it.

GTL: the code nobody can explain

GTL is the abbreviation that most often survives being decoded. People learn it stands for group-term life insurance, look at their stub, and find they are being taxed on insurance they never paid for.

Here is what is actually happening. An employer can generally exclude the cost of up to $50,000 of group-term life insurance coverage from an employee's wages, for income tax and for Social Security and Medicare alike. Above that limit the exclusion stops, and the employer must include in wages the cost of the coverage beyond $50,000, reduced by anything the employee paid toward it.

The amount is not the premium. It is a figure from an IRS table of the cost per $1,000 of protection for one month, keyed to your age, running from $0.05 a month under 25 to $2.06 a month at 70 and older. The published example makes the shape clear: an employee aged 45 with $200,000 of coverage who pays $100 a year toward it has $170 included in wages — $200,000 less the excluded $50,000, leaving $150,000, at $0.15 per $1,000 per month for twelve months, less the $100 they paid.

Three consequences follow, and they explain the strange way the line behaves:

The amount is subject to Social Security and Medicare, so you will see FICA taken on money that never reached you.
Income tax withholding on it is at the employer's option, which is why some stubs withhold and others do not.
It is reported in W-2 boxes 1, 3 and 5, and again in box 12 with code C — so the box 12 entry and the stub line describe the same thing.

Imputed income generally works this way: a benefit with a taxable value gets added to wages so it can be taxed, then subtracted again so it does not inflate your net. If your stub shows a code twice, once as an earning and once as a deduction of the same amount, that is what you are looking at.

When a code is not explained anywhere

Ask payroll for the legend. Most systems have one, and most stubs will print it if configured to.

If the answer does not come, where you work decides what happens next. Ohio requires the amount and purpose of each addition and deduction, so "Misc" beside a number is not an itemisation. Wisconsin allows the coding but still requires a reason for each deduction, and permits a bare "miscellaneous" label only for deductions the employee requested for personal reasons. And in California the inability to determine which deductions were made is not a grievance about clarity — it is the statutory injury that carries the penalty.

Checking a line against what it should be

The generator applies the 2026 federal, FICA and state withholding tables to a pay period and prints every line in full words, which is a quick way to see what a coded line on your own stub should amount to. What to include on a pay stub covers which items have to be there in the first place.