Program that calculates and prints the monthly paycheck for an employee

Hello, I'm trying to finish a program here for an assignment. The prompt from the book: Write a program that calculates and prints the monthly paycheck for an employee. The net pay is calculated after taking the following deductions:

Federal Income Tax: 15%
State Tax: 3.5%
Social security Tax: 5.75%
Medicare/Medicaid Tax: 2.75%
Pension Plan: 5%
Health Insurance $75.00

It complies fine, I just need to figure out mainly how to get the right formula for health Insurance.
Here is what I have:

If you need anymore of the program I can post the rest, but I think this is where my main focus needs to be fixed since I think it's trying to calculate it as a percent instead of just plain $75
any help on this would be great, and thank you in advance.

Welcome to CodeRanch!

This sounds more like a math problem than a programming problem. What exactly are you having a hard time with?

Well, I keep coming out with a negative number after the deductions. Like everything other tax deduction works out fine. It only seems to be the Health Insurances that seems to be the problem that isn't wanting to calculate properly, and I was wondering if I should be using something else besides

Well, show us exactly how you are calculating the final result, and what input values you're using.

Well, I keep coming out with a negative number after the deductions

Are you working out my paycheck Tyler? :-)

James Boswell wrote:

Well, I keep coming out with a negative number after the deductions

Are you working out my paycheck Tyler? :-)

Haha, would actually be mine most of the time.

Stephan van Hulst wrote:Well, show us exactly how you are calculating the final result, and what input values you're using.

System.out.println("Enter your Gross Pay: ");
			double pay = input.nextDouble();
	
			double gross_pay = pay * 1;
				
	System.out.println("Enter federal tax withholding rate: ");
			double fedtax = input.nextDouble();
			double fedtaxr = gross_pay * 0.15;
	
	System.out.println("Enter state tax withholding rate: ");
          double  statetax = input.nextDouble();
     		 double statetaxr = gross_pay * 0.035;
			 
	System.out.println("Enter Social Security tax withholding rate: ");
          double  socialtax = input.nextDouble();
     		 double socialtaxr = gross_pay * 0.0575;		 
   
	System.out.println("Enter Medicare/Medicaid tax withholding rate:");
          double  medicaretax = input.nextDouble();
     		 double medicaretaxr = gross_pay * 0.0275; 
			 
	System.out.println("Enter Pension Plan tax withholding rate:");
          double  pensiontax = input.nextDouble();
     		 double pensiontaxr = gross_pay * 0.05; 
	  
	  
	System.out.println("Enter Health Insurance tax withholding rate:");
          double  healthtax = input.nextDouble();
     		 double healthtaxr = gross_pay - 75.0 ;  
	  
          double deductions = fedtaxr + statetaxr + socialtaxr + medicaretaxr +
			 pensiontaxr + healthtaxr;
     
		double total_pay = gross_pay - deductions;
	
	System.out.println("Employee name: " + employee);
     
          
     
          System.out.println(" Enter gross pay: " + gross_pay);
     
          System.out.println(" Deductions: ");
          System.out.println("\t Federdal Withholding (15.0%): $ " + fedtaxr);
          System.out.println("\t State Withholding (3.5% ): $ " + statetaxr);
          System.out.println("\t Social Security Tax (5.75%): $ " + socialtaxr);
			 System.out.println("\t Medicare Tax (2.75%): $ " + medicaretaxr);
			 System.out.println("\t Pension Plan (5%): $ " + pensiontaxr);
			 System.out.println("\t Health Insurance ($75.00): $ " + healthtaxr);
			 System.out.println("\t Total deductions: $ " + deductions);
          System.out.println("Total pay: " + total_pay);

I hope this will give you what you're asking for? I hope I didn't put too much up here to go through. Sorry still pretty new to this.

The problem is that you're calculating health tax by deducting $75,- from the gross pay. When you later deduct this tax from the gross pay, it pretty much means you always get 75 bucks, before other deductions, regardless of how high your gross pay actually is.

The solution is to simply add 75 to the deductions, instead of healthtaxr. You can then remove healthtaxr completely.

PS. Why are you assigning input values to variables such as statetax, and then ignore them completely?

Would it have been better to just use those to define the variables and just less code in general?

Also, I would always use BigDecimal instead of doubles/floats when currency is involved.

I think you are trying to do too much at once. Get one bit working, then try to get the rest working. Don’lt attempt too much at once.
Also follow James Boswell’s advice: never never use doubles for money. Using floats is evern worse; both are unsuitable because of the restricted precision. I wrote an example of the use of BigDecimal here, with some problems demonstrated.
You ought to avoid coding things like 0.035. You are better off creating constants to store those values inYes, you ought to write documentation comments even for private fields where you know they won’t be displayed anywhere (or at least, I think you ought to). Yes, you need the quote marks around 0.15; you want to use a String argument, not a double.
Once you have got that all working, I suggest you enhance the system to read the tax rates from a text file.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:I think you are trying to do too much at once. Get one bit working, then try to get the rest working. Don’lt attempt too much at once.
Also follow James Boswell’s advice: never never use doubles for money. Using floats is evern worse; both are unsuitable because of the restricted precision. I wrote an example of the use of BigDecimal here, with some problems demonstrated.
You ought to avoid coding things like 0.035. You are better off creating constants to store those values in/** * The rate of federal tax: 15% */ private static final BigDecimal FEDERAL_TAX = new BigDecimal("0.15");Yes, you ought to write documentation comments even for private fields where you know they won’t be displayed anywhere (or at least, I think you ought to). Yes, you need the quote marks around 0.15; you want to use a String argument, not a double.
Once you have got that all working, I suggest you enhance the system to read the tax rates from a text file.

but please give them helpful names, not like the ones I found in code last week, ID_SERIAL_135 = 135

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Also follow James Boswell’s advice: never never use doubles for money.

While I would never use doubles for real accounting calculations, I think for beginners to the language, it's fine to use it for money in exercises, if the exercise includes the caveat that we don't do this for real, but are doing it here to keep things simple and avoid distracting from the core topic being taught.

Wendy Gibbons wrote:. . . ID_SERIAL_135 = 135

What’s wrong with that?

Campbell Ritchie wrote:

Wendy Gibbons wrote:. . . ID_SERIAL_135 = 135

What’s wrong with that?

Erm....carpel-tunnel syndrome?

Winston

Campbell Ritchie wrote:

Wendy Gibbons wrote:. . . ID_SERIAL_135 = 135

What’s wrong with that?

the actual code went

Wendy Gibbons wrote:
if(idSerial == ID_SERIAL_112){...} else if (idSerial == ID_SERIAL_42){...} else if (idSerial == ID_SERIAL_135){...} // continue for all 7 special cases.

It's like poetry in praise of Enums!

Wendy Gibbons wrote: . . . the actual code went . . .

Oh, that’s even better! You have some brilliant people there who ought to supply material to Roedy Green.