Social and health insurance

Two insurances, split between you and the employer

Before any income tax is worked out, two separate insurances come off the gross wage: social insurance (sociální pojištění) and health insurance (zdravotní pojištění). Each is split between the employee and the employer, and only the employee’s share reduces your take-home. The employer’s share is a real labour cost but it is not withheld from your pay — and, since the superhrubá base was removed, it is not part of your tax base either.

So the part that comes off your pay is 7,1 % social plus 4,5 % health. The employer pays considerably more on top — 24,8 % social and 9 % health — which is why a job’s cost to an employer is well above the gross on your contract.

Social insurance has an annual maximum base

Social insurance stops at a ceiling. The maximum assessment base for 2026 is 2 350 416 Kč, set at forty-eight times the average wage. The point most calculators get wrong is that this cap is annual and cumulative over the calendar year, not a monthly limit. A very high earner keeps paying 7,1 % social every month until their year-to-date base reaches 2 350 416 Kč, and then stops paying social insurance for the rest of the year — so their net pay actually rises in the later months. Spread evenly, the cap works out to about 195 868 Kč a month, but that monthly figure is only an approximation of a genuinely year-long limit.

Health insurance has no ceiling

Health insurance behaves in the opposite way: it has no maximum base at all. The 4,5 % employee share applies to the full gross, however high, with no upper limit. This is the sharpest structural difference between the two insurances — above the social cap a high earner stops paying social but keeps paying 4,5 % health forever. The two must be modelled separately, and this calculator does.

The minimum base — and the top-up that catches part-timers

Health insurance also has a floor. Its minimum assessment base is the minimum wage, 22 400 Kč a month for 2026. If your actual gross is below that — a low-hours part-time job, for instance — health insurance is still charged as if you earned the minimum base. The shortfall is topped up at the full 13,5 % of the difference (not the 4,5 % employee rate), and that top-up is the employee’s to pay. It can noticeably reduce the net pay of a very-low-wage job. Social insurance, by contrast, has no such employee minimum — the two floors are different, and it would be a mistake to mirror them. Some groups — ZTP/P certificate holders, pensioners, and people for whom the state pays the premium — are exempt from the minimum assessment base.

The rates and bases on this page are those in force for 2026, taken from the sources this page cites and shown to set out the structure. If a rule changed recently it may not be reflected here yet, and none of them has been through our final sign-off — for an official amount, check the cited source or your payslip.