Privacy policy

Calculator inputs

Every calculation on this site runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript loaded with the page. Your income, deductions, filing status, and every other figure you enter are processed on your own device.

Specifically:

• Nothing you enter is transmitted to our servers or to any third party.
• Nothing you enter is written to a database, a log file, or a cookie.
• Nothing you enter appears in the page address, so it cannot reach a server log or a third-party script that reads the address.
• Nothing you enter is included in analytics events.
• Closing or refreshing the page discards everything.

We never ask for your name, address, Social Security number, taxpayer identification number, bank account, or card details, and no calculator on this site has a field for any of them. If a page ever appears to ask you for one, it is not ours.

Shareable links

Each calculator has a Copy link button that builds a URL carrying the figures you entered, so you can bookmark a scenario or send it to an accountant. The link is built in your browser and copied to your clipboard; nothing is uploaded when you create it.

Where those figures sit inside the link matters, so here is exactly how it works. They go after the #, in what a browser calls the fragment:

https://calc365.net/calculators/take-home-pay#s=grossPay%3D82000%26state%3DTX

A fragment is never put on the wire. It is not part of the request your browser sends, so it reaches no host of ours, no content delivery network in front of it, no server log, and no Referer header on any other request the page makes. Figures in a query string — the part after a ? — would reach all four. That is why they are not there.

When you open a link that carries figures, the page does one thing before anything else on it runs: it reads them, fills the form, and takes them out of the address bar. They are held in memory and in your browser's own per-tab session storage, so refreshing still shows your scenario, but the live page address becomes a plain one. That is what keeps them out of the advertising request the page makes a moment later, which is otherwise sent the whole address, fragment included.

Links shared before this change put the figures in the query string instead. Those still work. On arrival they are lifted out of the query and the address is rewritten, so the figures are transmitted at most once — on that first request — rather than on every request from then on.

The link still contains your figures. Anyone you send it to can read them, and any chat app, mail service, or ticketing system it passes through may store them. Treat a shared calculation link exactly as you would treat the numbers themselves. The button says so at the moment you press it.

One parameter is deliberately left in the address: ?q=, the search term on the calculator directory. That is a phrase like "mortgage", not a figure about you, and a search engine needs to be able to see it.

Analytics

We record which calculators are used and how far people get, so we can tell what is useful and what is broken. Every event carries five fields and no others: the event name, the calculator identifier, its category, a device class of mobile, tablet, or desktop, and the slug of the page it happened on. A complete example: calculator_valid_result, take-home-pay, taxes, mobile, take-home-pay.

No event carries an amount, an income, a tax result, a balance, a filing status, or anything else you typed — and not because we remember not to add one. The payload is assembled from those five fields and then checked against a fixed vocabulary: an event whose name is not on the list is discarded, and a value that is not a short recognised identifier is dropped. There is no field a figure could travel in.

The page address reported to Google Analytics is trimmed to the site name and the path before it is sent, with the query string and the fragment removed. The referring page is trimmed the same way.

The full list of events, and the automated tests that hold the code to it, are published in the repository as docs/analytics-events.md.

Cookies and local storage

The calculators set no cookies and write nothing to local storage. There is one exception, and it exists to protect your figures rather than to follow you: when you open a shared link, the scenario it carries is kept in session storage so that refreshing the page does not lose it. Session storage is per-tab, is discarded when you close the tab, is never transmitted, and is readable only by this site.

Ad providers may set their own cookies under their own policies; where required, you will be asked for consent before any non-essential cookie is set, and declining is always available.

Advertising

This site displays advertising to cover its costs, supplied by Google AdSense. Google operates under its own privacy policy and may use cookies or similar technologies to choose what is shown; you can review and change what Google uses at My Ad Center.

We give advertisers nothing you enter into a calculator, because we never have it. The one thing an ad request does carry is the address of the page you are on, which is exactly why shared figures are taken out of the address before the ad script runs. Advertising has no influence on which calculators exist, what they compute, or which sources they cite — that separation is written down on the methodology page.

External links

We link to IRS, Social Security Administration, and state government pages so you can verify our figures. Those sites have their own privacy practices, and this policy does not cover them.

Children

This site is intended for adults managing their own tax affairs. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the revised version will be posted here with an updated review date. The commitment that calculator inputs stay on your device is fundamental to how the site is built, not a preference that might quietly change.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent through the contact page.