Editorial Standards
These guides exist to make payroll and pay stubs legible to people who did not choose to become payroll experts. This page explains who writes them, how they are researched, and what we will and will not claim.
Who writes these guides
Articles here are published under a collective byline, OakPaystubs Team, rather than an individual one. That byline is accurate: our guides are researched, drafted, and reviewed by the team that builds the pay stub product itself — people who work with payroll calculations, tax withholding, and state pay-statement rules daily because the software depends on getting them right.
We use a collective byline deliberately rather than attaching invented author personas to articles. When an individual contributor's expertise is material to a piece, we will name and credit them directly.
How we research
Guidance on tax, wage, and recordkeeping rules is drawn from primary sources — IRS publications and forms, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the relevant state labor and revenue agencies — rather than from secondary summaries or other blogs.
Where a rule varies by state or changes on a schedule, we say so plainly instead of publishing a single figure that will quietly go stale. Rates and thresholds that the IRS adjusts annually are described as such.
What we do not do
We do not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. Our articles explain how payroll mechanics generally work; they are not a substitute for a professional who knows your specific circumstances, and we say so in the articles themselves where the distinction matters.
We also do not publish content encouraging falsified income documentation. Creating your own pay stub from real earnings is legitimate and common for self-employed people; inventing figures to obtain credit or housing is fraud, and our guides draw that line explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous.
Review and updates
Each article carries a publication date, and any article we revise carries a visible last-updated date. We update guides when the underlying rule changes, when a figure we cite is adjusted, or when we find an error.
Updating an article means revising it in place rather than republishing it under a new date. We do not refresh dates without substantive changes to the content.
Corrections
If you find an error in one of our guides, we want to know. Corrections are made directly in the article and the last-updated date is changed to reflect the revision.
Report anything that looks wrong through our support team and it will reach the people who maintain these pages.
Spotted something wrong?
Corrections are welcome and are made directly in the affected article. Contact the OakPaystubs team and it will reach the people who maintain these guides.