How It Works

What is this?

This tool takes your employer's annual profit — a number that usually lives at an incomprehensible scale, like "$40 billion" — and brings it down to a human one. You enter your company and your salary, and it shows you what your share of that profit would be if it had been split equally among all employees.

The most common response is: "Companies can't just hand all their profit to workers — they need it for reinvestment, R&D, long-term strategy." That's true. This tool doesn't argue otherwise.

The point is to make the number personal. Not to make a policy argument, but to ask: what would that mean for me, specifically? And from there, harder questions follow naturally — who decides what happens to the profit workers help generate? What share of the value they create do they receive back? How are those decisions made, and by whom? The number doesn't answer those questions. It just makes them easier to ask.

We want to be as neutral as possible. The goal is to show the numbers as they are — from public SEC filings — and let people draw their own conclusions. What you do with that information is up to you.

What they said they made

Net income is a company's official profit after paying all expenses, interest, and taxes — the bottom line on their income statement. It's the number reported to shareholders and filed with the SEC.

Your "fair share" is calculated by dividing total net income evenly across all employees, then scaling to your hours worked:

That amount is added to your actual salary to show what you would have earned if the company's profit had been shared equally with every worker.

Why net income can be misleading: It can be heavily influenced by one-time charges (like writing down an acquisition), tax strategies, or interest on debt. A company can report low net income while generating substantial cash from its core operations. That's why we also show EBITDA.

What they actually made

EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. It strips out accounting adjustments and financing costs to show how much cash the core business generates — often the figure executives and investors focus on.

The same fair-share formula applies:

Why we show both: Net income is the legally reported profit figure — directly comparable to worker wages. EBITDA shows operational cash generation stripped of financing choices and non-cash accounting. For capital-intensive industries (airlines, utilities, manufacturing), EBITDA can be 2–5× higher than net income. Showing both lets you see the full range.

When they diverge: A company with heavy debt will show low net income (due to interest payments) but healthy EBITDA. A company that just wrote off a failed acquisition will show a net loss but positive EBITDA. Neither number alone tells the whole story.

EBITDA for banks and insurers

For most companies, EBITDA is a useful lens on operational earnings. For banks and insurance companies, it works differently — and the gap between EBITDA and net income usually reflects structural factors, not hidden profits owed to workers.

Why banks are different: A bank's core business is borrowing money cheaply and lending it at higher rates. "Interest expense" isn't a financing cost tacked onto their business — it is the cost of their product. Standard EBITDA adds back interest expense as if it were optional; for a bank, it isn't. This means EBITDA for a bank can be much higher than net income largely because banks pay substantial taxes and have minimal depreciation, not because they're hiding operational earnings.

Why insurers are different: Insurance companies earn money by collecting premiums and investing them. Their reported earnings include investment portfolio returns, reserve adjustments, and catastrophe losses — none of which map cleanly to "what workers produced." EBITDA strips out some of these but not all, making it an imperfect proxy for operational performance.

What this means for the calculator: When you look up a bank or insurer, both numbers are shown for completeness. Net income is the legally reported figure. EBITDA is higher largely due to taxes and minimal depreciation — not because there's a secret operational surplus. For financial companies, net income is often the more honest baseline for a fair-share calculation.

Company Kept & Federal Tax

At the bottom of your results, we show two things: how much the company kept from your labor, and how much the federal government took in income tax.

"[Company] kept $X from your labor" is calculated using net income — the same figure shown in the "What they said they made" section above.

This figure is not the same as the adjusted salaries shown above. It's the estimated share of the company's profit that was generated per employee — and kept instead of being distributed to workers.

For how the federal tax estimate is calculated — including a full bracket breakdown and worked example — see Federal Income Tax Estimate below.

Stock Buybacks & Dividends

For many companies, we also show what they gave to shareholders — either through stock buybacks, dividends, or both.

Stock buybacks happen when a company uses its cash to repurchase its own shares from the market. This reduces the number of shares outstanding, which increases earnings per share and typically boosts the stock price — a direct transfer of value to shareholders.

Dividends are cash payments made directly to shareholders, typically on a quarterly schedule. Unlike buybacks, dividends go to all shareholders proportionally based on how many shares they hold.

When either or both are present, we show what your salary would look like if that money had been split equally among all employees instead:

That amount is added to your salary alongside the profit share, giving you a sense of the total pool of money flowing out to investors in a given year.

Federal Income Tax Estimate

The federal tax figure is an estimate of what a single filer would owe in U.S. federal income tax on the displayed salary, using 2024 tax brackets and the standard deduction.

Tax is then calculated at progressive rates — each rate applies only to the slice of income within that bracket, not to your whole salary. Moving into a higher bracket never reduces your take-home pay.

Worked example — $100,000 salary:

First, subtract the standard deduction: $100,000 − $14,600 = $85,400 taxable income.

Then tax each slice separately:

That's an effective rate of 13.8% — even though the top bracket hit was 22%. The 22% rate only applied to the $38,250 above $47,150, not the full $100,000. The first $11,600 was only taxed at 10% regardless.

This is why getting a raise that puts you into a higher bracket is always worth it — you only pay the higher rate on the extra dollars, never on what you were already earning.

Where the data comes from

Financial data is fetched live from multiple sources and cross-validated:

• SEC EDGAR — official XBRL filings (10-K annual reports) for profit, EBITDA, and employee counts
• Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) — income and cash flow statements
• Finnhub — company profiles and financial metrics
• Wikipedia — employee counts from company infoboxes
• Alpha Vantage — supplemental financials for international companies
• SEC filings / Yahoo Finance — stock buyback and dividend figures, sourced from annual cash flow statements

Employee counts and financials reflect the most recently available annual report. We do our best to employ sanity checks. When sources disagree, the tool cross-validates values and picks the most consistent result. We manually inspect data as much as possible. If you think a result is wrong, use this link to report bad data.