Plain-English guides for military pay, LES review, benefits, taxes, and retirement planning.
These guides support the calculators with practical explanations of pay statements, allowances, deductions, benefits, and planning choices for service members and military families. Every guide is written by a currently serving Reserve officer who reads his own LES every month — not summarized from press releases.
Military compensation is deliberately confusing. Your Leave and Earnings Statement crams base pay, BAH, BAS, special pays, federal and state tax withholding, FICA, SGLI, TSP elections, and leave balances into a single dense document — and most service members never get formal training on how to read it. Finance office errors are common enough that DFAS maintains an entire claims process for pay corrections. The guides below exist so you can catch those errors yourself before they cost you money.
A field-by-field walkthrough of the LES: entitlements, deductions, allotments, leave accrual, TSP contributions, and the remarks section where DFAS buries the important notices. Covers the most common pay errors (wrong BAH dependency status, missing special pays, incorrect state of legal residence for tax withholding) and how to get each one fixed through your finance office.
How the TSP actually works under the Blended Retirement System: automatic 1% agency contributions, the 5% matching schedule, traditional vs. Roth elections, fund choices (G, F, C, S, I, and lifecycle funds), and why leaving match money on the table is the most expensive mistake junior enlisted make. Includes contribution-limit rules for combat-zone tax-exempt pay.
Guides explain the system; the calculators give you your numbers. If you haven't already, run your own figures first — the guides make far more sense when you're looking at your actual pay breakdown alongside them.
Most military pay content online is written by content farms that have never seen an LES. The tell is always the same: vague language ("consult your finance office"), no dollar amounts, and no mention of the edge cases that actually trip people up — mid-month pay splits, partial-month BAH proration on PCS moves, the difference between your pay date and your years-of-service longevity date, or how Reserve drill pay interacts with civilian income at tax time. These guides are maintained against the current DFAS pay tables and updated when the rules change, most recently for the 2026 pay raise of 3.8%.
Found an error, or want a guide on a topic that isn't covered yet? Tell us — reader corrections get reviewed against DFAS source documents and folded in.