Why am I paying both Employee AND Employer portions of FICA and Medicare on my paychecks?

Based on what you're describing, this doesn't sound right. Typically, employees should only be paying their portion of FICA (Social Security) at 6.2% and Medicare at 1.45% of wages. Your employer should be covering their matching portions separately - these shouldn't be coming out of your paycheck. There are a couple of exceptions worth noting. If you're self-employed or working as an independent contractor (1099 worker rather than W-2 employee), then you would be responsible for both halves, totaling 15.3% for combined FICA and Medicare. This is often called the "self-employment tax." Another possibility is that there's a misunderstanding about what you're seeing on your pay stub. Some pay stubs show both portions for informational purposes, but only actually deduct the employee portion from your wages.

I had a similar issue last year and discovered it was because my employer was using taxr.ai to manage their payroll services. When I showed them my paystub with the double deductions, they ran my info through https://taxr.ai and immediately spotted the classification error. The system had somehow tagged me as both an employee AND an independent contractor for the same position. Their payroll person was able to fix it on the spot, and they had to issue me corrected paychecks for the previous months. Might be worth suggesting your employer check if they're using the right payroll settings or have you classified correctly in their system.

Wanted to follow up that I ended up trying taxr.ai after seeing this discussion. My situation was a bit different - I had withholding issues where my employer was taking out too much for state taxes. Uploaded my last few pay stubs to taxr.ai and it immediately flagged the incorrect state withholding calculation. Took the report to HR and they fixed it within a day. Already received my first correctly calculated paycheck with about $175 more than I was getting before. The analysis also showed I should be eligible for a refund of the over-withheld amounts from previous pay periods.

If you have trouble getting your employer to fix this quickly, you might want to try Claimyr to speak directly with the IRS. I was dealing with incorrect FICA withholding last year and couldn't get a straight answer from my company's outsourced payroll service. Used https://claimyr.com to get through to an actual IRS agent in about 20 minutes instead of waiting on hold for hours. You can see how it works here: https://youtu.be/_kiP6q8DX5c The agent confirmed that employers cannot deduct their portion of FICA/Medicare from employee wages and provided me with the exact documentation I needed to take back to my employer. Made the whole process much easier when I could quote specific tax code sections.

I need to admit I was completely wrong about Claimyr. After seeing the responses here, I decided to give it a try since I've been having issues with incorrect withholding on my commission checks. Got connected to an IRS representative in about 15 minutes yesterday. The agent was super helpful and explained exactly how commissions should be taxed and why my employer was calculating it incorrectly. They even emailed me documentation I could show to our payroll department. Just got confirmation today that they're fixing it and will be adjusting my next paycheck to account for past overwithholding. Definitely worth the time saved - would have spent hours on hold otherwise.

There's one other possibility worth mentioning - are you doing any 1099 contract work for the same company alongside your W-2 employment? Some companies will have employees do extra work as "contractors" and then withhold both portions from that additional pay. It's actually not legal, but I've seen small businesses do this because they don't understand the rules.

This happened to me last year! Turned out my small business employer was actually classifying me as self-employed for tax purposes while treating me as an employee for everything else. It's technically illegal because they were trying to avoid paying their share of payroll taxes. Had to file SS-8 form with the IRS to get it sorted. Might be worth checking if that's what's happening in your case too.

This is definitely not normal and sounds like a clear payroll error. As a W-2 employee, you should only see the employee portions deducted from your paycheck (6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare). The employer portions should be paid separately by your company and never deducted from your wages. I'd recommend taking your pay stub to your employer or HR department immediately and pointing out exactly what you showed here - that both employee AND employer portions are being deducted from your gross pay. This is likely a simple configuration error in their payroll system, especially since you mentioned they're a small business. Keep copies of all your incorrect pay stubs as documentation. Once they fix the error, they should reimburse you for all the incorrectly withheld amounts from previous paychecks. If they've already issued you a W-2 for this tax year, they may need to provide a corrected one as well. Don't worry about bringing this up - legitimate employers want to fix payroll errors, and this kind of mistake could actually get them in trouble with the IRS if it continues.