Pay stubs are an important way to verify your income. They’re needed to get approved for a variety of loans and credit products. In other cases, you may need to use pay stubs to verify your taxable income, or to apply for unemployment benefits.
Unfortunately, if you have moved to different jobs over time, it may be hard to get a record of income from old employers. Fortunately, the following guide will detail how to get old pay stubs.
How to Get Old Pay Stubs: Check Online
If your employer works through an online payroll provider, you may be able to go online and access your pay stubs yourself. Log in to the portal and see your tax documents and pay stubs are available to print. You may have to register online to do so if you haven’t already.
Formal Request
In other cases, especially if you process payroll manually in-house, you will have to put in a request. Speak with someone in the department, or put in a formal request if one is offered. It’s always best to explain why you need access to a previous pay stub, and what happened to the original one (if you received one).
File a Complaint
In some cases, your employer may be legally required to give you a pay stub, but has not done so. If this is the case, you can get in touch with your state labor board. Penalties will vary by state, and you can usually submit a tip anonymously, so check your local regulations and decide if this is a path you want to go down.
Make Your Own
Of course, in some cases, it may not be possible to recover old pay stubs. This may be the case in the event that your old employer has gone bankrupt, or if pay stubs were never issued in the first place. In some cases, if you opted for direct deposit, you may not have pay stubs available to you.
In others, employers may simply opt to not issue pay stubs because it is not mandated to do so under federal and some state laws. In this case, the cost of issuing another pay stub is deemed too great, and you’re left on your own.
In these uncommon cases, you can use this PayStubCreator to generate a proof of income if you remember how much you used to earn. Working backward from your W2 and other tax forms is a good place to start.
Always Keep a Copy
While all of the above methods are effective ways how to get old pay stubs from old employers, in most cases they require quite a bit of effort. To help prevent going through the process several times, it’s always a good idea to create a digital backup of your pay stubs. Keep them on hand for a few years, just in case – you never know when you may need them.
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