"Is this right?" is the question that sends most people straight to HR with their payslip — but a surprising number of those queries are answerable yourself in a few minutes, with your offer letter and the payslip open side by side.
Step 1: Check the earnings side against your offer letter
Basic salary, HRA, and any other named allowance should match what's in your offer letter or the most recent revision you agreed to. A mismatch here is the most common genuine error worth flagging — everything else on the payslip is calculated from these numbers, so if they're wrong, everything downstream is wrong too.
Step 2: Confirm gross earnings adds up
Basic + HRA + Other Allowances should equal the stated Gross Earnings figure. This is simple addition, rarely wrong, but worth a 10-second check before assuming a problem lies elsewhere.
Step 3: Check each deduction is one you actually expect
PF should be roughly the expected percentage of your basic salary (check your specific scheme's rate — it can vary). Professional tax, if it applies in your state, should be a small, fairly fixed amount. Anything under "Other Deductions" should have an explanation you recognize — a loan repayment, an insurance premium you signed up for — not an unexplained number.
Step 4: Confirm net pay follows from the above
Gross Earnings minus Total Deductions should equal Net Pay exactly. If it doesn't, that's a real calculation error worth raising — but this is genuinely rare, since payroll systems automate this step; the actual errors almost always live upstream, in the earnings or deduction line items themselves, not in this final subtraction.
When it's actually worth emailing HR
A basic salary that doesn't match your offer letter, a deduction you don't recognize and can't explain, or gross/net figures that don't reconcile with their own components — all worth raising, with the specific line item and expected figure called out directly, rather than a general "does this look right?" A specific question with your own numbers already checked gets resolved faster than a vague one.
Using the tools
If you're the one issuing payslips rather than receiving them, our Salary Slip Generator calculates gross earnings, total deductions, and net pay automatically from the inputs, so this kind of arithmetic error isn't something a generated slip can have in the first place.
Try it here: Salary Slip Generator.