Understanding Your Union Paycheck
A quick guide to the withholdings, deductions, and fringes that make up a union trades worker's paycheck — and why the take-home is less than you'd expect.
Understanding Your Union Paycheck
If you’re a union plumber, pipefitter, or other trades worker, your paycheck has a lot more going on than a typical W-2 job. Here’s a quick breakdown of where the money goes.
Gross Pay
Your gross pay starts with your hourly rate multiplied by hours worked. But union work often includes overtime (1.5x) and sometimes double-time (2.0x) or triple-time (3.0x) — so one week at 50 hours looks very different from a week at 40.
Taxes
Just like any job, federal income tax, state income tax (MO or KS), Social Security (6.2%), and Medicare (1.45%) come off the top. But here’s the nuance: Missouri and Kansas use different withholding formulas, and if you work in both states during a pay period, your employer prorates the state tax by hours worked in each state.
Workers on Kansas City or St. Louis job sites may also owe a 1% local earnings tax.
Union Deductions
These are amounts deducted from your paycheck:
- Supplemental Dues — a flat per-hour amount
- Local Dues — a percentage of gross pay
- PIAP Fund — Political/Industry Advancement, also a percentage
- Vacation Savings — typically 10% of gross, set aside for you
These are all post-tax, meaning they come out after tax withholding is calculated.
Employer-Paid Fringes
This is the part most members don’t see on their stub. Your employer pays additional amounts on top of your hourly rate into benefit funds:
- National Pension Fund (NPF) — defined benefit pension
- Local Pension — additional local retirement benefit
- Health & Welfare — medical, dental, vision coverage
- Defined Contribution (401k) — employer contribution to your retirement account
- Training Fund — apprenticeship and continuing education
These don’t reduce your take-home pay, but they’re a massive part of your total compensation package.
Why It Matters
When you understand the math behind your paycheck, you can:
- Verify your stub — catch errors before they compound
- Plan for retirement — see how today’s contributions grow over 20+ years
- Make informed decisions — understand the real cost of a DC election or raise allocation
That’s exactly what UnionCraft helps you do — run the numbers yourself, with every calculation sourced back to your CBA and plan documents.
UnionCraft is an educational calculator that does the arithmetic your union’s documents define. It is not financial advice.