Export a Pay Stub as PDF, PNG, CSV, or Text

You finished the stub. Now there’s an export button, and it’s asking you a question nobody prepared you for: PDF, PNG, CSV, or text?

Most payroll software never asks, because most payroll software only makes PDFs. That works right up until your bookkeeper asks for the numbers in a spreadsheet, or a worker on a cracked Android phone can’t open the attachment you sent.

The format is really a decision about who is going to open the file, and what they need to do with it once they have.

The four formats, and what each one is actually for

The whole answer, up front. Pick by recipient, not by habit.

| Who’s receiving it | Format | Why | |---|---|---| | Landlord, mortgage lender, benefits agency, court | PDF | Fixed layout, fixed pagination, prints identically everywhere. This is the document of record. | | A worker on their phone, a text message, WhatsApp, Slack | PNG | Renders inline with zero clicks. No app needed to open it. | | Bookkeeper, accountant, QuickBooks or Xero import, year-end totals | CSV | The raw line items as data a spreadsheet can sum and sort. | | Email body, support ticket, a plain archive you’ll still be able to read in 2050 | Text | No attachment, no dependencies, greppable forever. |

Two of these are renders and two are data. PDF and PNG capture how the stub looks: pixels and layout, beautiful for humans, useless to a spreadsheet. CSV and text capture what the stub says: the numbers, as numbers.

That split explains almost every export mistake people make. Sending a bookkeeper a PDF isn’t wrong exactly, it just hands them an afternoon of re-typing. Sending a landlord a CSV is wrong in a more obvious way.

PDF: the format third parties expect

When a landlord, a lender, or a benefits office says “send us your pay stub,” they mean a PDF. It’s the default, and for external recipients it’s the right default.

A PDF locks the layout. Fonts, spacing, column alignment, and page breaks come out the same on a Mac, a Windows machine, a phone, and a printer in a leasing office. Nothing reflows. Nothing gets cut off. In Payslip44 the PDF assembles into standard A4 pages, so what you saw in the preview is exactly what lands in the recipient’s inbox.

Some practical hygiene that matters more than people expect. Send the original file, never a photo of your screen: a camera shot of a monitor is the fastest way to get a document questioned. Name it like an adult, because PayStub_2026-05-15.pdf beats document(3).pdf when someone is filing twelve of them. And know how many they want. Landlords typically ask for two or three recent stubs, while mortgage lenders usually want 30 to 60 days’ worth, per guidance from rental and lending resources like TurboTenant.

If you only ever export one format, this is the one. But it shouldn’t be the only one you keep, and I’ll get to why.

PNG: for when a picture beats an attachment (and why it isn’t a screenshot)

PNG is the format nobody writes about, and it solves a real problem: attachments are friction.

An image renders inline. Drop a PNG stub into iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, or an email and the recipient sees it without tapping anything, without a PDF viewer, without downloading. For sending a worker their stub on payday, that’s often the kindest thing you can do. Payslip44 stitches the same A4 pages into one tall image, so it scrolls naturally on a phone.

Now the caveat, because it’s the part that trips people up.

Do not send a PNG for income verification. Landlords and lenders are suspicious of images, and they have reason to be. Property-management screening tools treat screenshots as easily manipulated, and guidance aimed at renters routinely tells them to submit the original PDF instead of a screenshot.

The frustrating bit is that an exported PNG is not a screenshot. It’s rendered from the underlying record at full resolution, the same way the PDF is. Technically it’s a cleaner artifact than a cropped phone capture. But the person receiving it usually can’t tell the difference, and their screening software definitely can’t. Perception wins.

So: PNG for people who already trust you. PDF for people who are deciding whether to.

CSV: the format your bookkeeper actually wants

CSV is where the money stops being a picture and starts being data.

A CSV export carries the line items in rows: earnings by type, deductions split by category (tax, pre-tax, after-tax), employer contributions, adjustments, year-to-date columns. Every one of those is a cell a spreadsheet can add up, sort, filter, or pivot. Reconciling twelve months of stubs against a bank statement is a five-minute job in CSV. In PDF it’s an afternoon with a calculator and a growing sense of regret.

It also travels everywhere. Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, and LibreOffice all open CSV natively. QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, and Wave all import it. That happens because CSV is an actual documented standard with a registered text/csv MIME type (RFC 4180), and has been for decades. The Library of Congress lists it as a sustainable preservation format, which is a quiet endorsement most file types never get.

The tradeoff is plain. CSV has no logo, no styling, no layout. It looks like what it is: a grid of values. Nobody is impressed by a CSV, and no landlord will accept one. That’s not the job it’s doing.

One thing worth knowing about how the numbers get into the file: money math done in floating point drifts. Payslip44 uses decimal arithmetic throughout, so the totals in the CSV match the totals on the PDF to the cent, and your bookkeeper doesn’t open a spreadsheet full of values ending in .9999999.

Text: the underrated one

Plain text export exists, almost nobody explains why, and the reasons are better than you’d guess.

It needs no attachment. Paste the stub straight into an email body and the recipient reads it without opening anything, which means it can’t get stuck in an attachment filter, a corporate download block, or a phone that refuses to preview PDFs. It also goes anywhere text goes: support tickets, chat threads, a note in your accounting system, a comment on an invoice.

Then there’s longevity. A .txt file will open in fifty years with software that hasn’t been invented yet. That’s a strange thing to care about until you try to open a payroll file from 2004.

And it diffs. Drop this period’s text stub next to last period’s and any decent diff tool shows you exactly what changed. Catching a deduction that silently moved is a genuinely useful trick, and no PDF viewer will do it for you.

Small format, small section, real utility.

Which to keep: retention, and why “export both” is the real answer

Now the part that decides your workflow, rather than just this one send.

Federal recordkeeping rules are clearer than most people assume, and they’re format-agnostic:

The Department of Labor requires employers to preserve payroll records for at least 3 years, and the records that wage computations are based on (time cards, work schedules, wage-rate tables) for 2 years. Notably, the Act “requires no particular form for the records,” and they don’t have to be on paper. See DOL WHD Fact Sheet #21.
The IRS requires you to keep all records of employment taxes for at least 4 years after you file the fourth-quarter return for the year. Certain COVID-era leave and retention credit records run to 6 years. See IRS Employment Tax Recordkeeping and Publication 15.

No agency mandates a file format. That freedom is the whole point, and it leads somewhere specific.

So export both. A PDF as the human-readable document of record, and a CSV as the machine-readable data of record. The PDF is what you produce when someone asks to see a stub in year three. The CSV is what you use when you need to total, reconcile, or migrate, without paying an OCR tool to guess at your own paperwork. In Payslip44 that’s one extra tap at creation time, and it saves you from a problem you won’t see coming for two years.

A quick note on delivery, since it usually comes up in the same breath: federal law doesn’t require you to furnish a pay stub at all. But 41 states require some form of pay statement, and nine require none (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee), per Paycor’s state-by-state roundup. Hawaii is the lone opt-in state for electronic delivery, meaning the employee has to affirmatively agree. Delaware, Minnesota, and Oregon are opt-out. That roundup is a vendor blog and a good one, but confirm against your own state labor department before you build a policy on it.

Going the other way: turning a PDF stub back into data

If you searched for this topic, you may have landed on a wall of tools promising to convert a pay stub PDF into a spreadsheet. Those exist because a lot of people receive stubs as PDFs and need the numbers out.

They work, sort of. OCR and PDF parsing are lossy. Columns get misread, negative numbers lose their signs, a deduction row merges with the one above it. Anything extracted this way needs a human to check it against the source, which means you’ve spent money and time to get back to where you started.

The obvious move is to skip the round trip. If you export CSV at the moment you create the stub, the data was never trapped in a render in the first place, and no parser ever has to guess. Extraction is a fix for a problem you can simply not create.

Frequently Asked Questions

What file format should I use for a pay stub?

PDF for anything going to a third party (landlord, lender, agency); CSV when the destination is a spreadsheet or accounting software; PNG for a quick inline send; text for an email body or a plain archive.

Can I send a pay stub as a PNG image instead of a PDF?

Yes for informal sharing, but not for income verification. Landlords and lenders want the original PDF, because image files read as screenshots, and screening software treats screenshots with suspicion.

Why would I export a pay stub as CSV?

Because CSV carries the raw line items as data. It’s what you hand a bookkeeper, import into QuickBooks or Xero, or use to total a year’s earnings and deductions in a spreadsheet, none of which a PDF can do without re-typing or OCR.

Is a PDF pay stub legally acceptable?

The FLSA prescribes no particular form for payroll records, and the IRS doesn’t mandate a format either, so a PDF is fine. What matters is that the required information is present and the records are retained for the required period.

How long do I need to keep pay stubs and payroll records?

The DOL requires payroll records be preserved at least 3 years, and 2 years for the underlying wage-computation records. The IRS requires employment tax records be kept at least 4 years. Keeping both a PDF and a CSV covers you for both readability and reuse.

Can I convert a pay stub PDF back into a spreadsheet?

Yes, with an OCR or parsing tool, but the result is lossy and needs checking. Exporting CSV at the moment you create the stub avoids the problem entirely.

Do I have to give employees a pay stub?

Federal law doesn’t require it, but 41 states require some form of pay statement. Nine (AL, AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, OH, SD, TN) have no requirement. Check your state.

Can I email a pay stub to an employee instead of printing it?

In most states yes, provided the employee can access and print it. Hawaii requires the employee to opt in to electronic delivery. Delaware, Minnesota, and Oregon let employees opt out and request paper.

The short version

Match the format to the recipient. PDF when someone official is going to look at it, PNG when someone friendly is going to glance at it, CSV when a machine is going to read it, text when you want it to survive.

And when you build the stub, export the PDF and the CSV together. Future you, three years from now, with an auditor’s email open and a folder of unsearchable renders, will be grateful.

Payslip44 does all four exports on-device, with decimal-precise money math and reusable employer, employee, and item templates so you’re not retyping the same details every pay period. Download it and see which format you actually reach for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What file format should I use for a pay stub?

Can I send a pay stub as a PNG image instead of a PDF?

Why would I export a pay stub as CSV?

Because CSV carries the raw line items as data. It's what you hand a bookkeeper, import into QuickBooks or Xero, or use to total a year's earnings and deductions in a spreadsheet, none of which a PDF can do without re-typing or OCR.

Is a PDF pay stub legally acceptable?

The FLSA prescribes no particular form for payroll records, and the IRS doesn't mandate a format either, so a PDF is fine. What matters is that the required information is present and the records are retained for the required period.

How long do I need to keep pay stubs and payroll records?

Can I convert a pay stub PDF back into a spreadsheet?

Yes, with an OCR or parsing tool, but the result is lossy and needs checking. Exporting CSV at the moment you create the stub avoids the problem entirely.

Do I have to give employees a pay stub?

Federal law doesn't require it, but 41 states require some form of pay statement. Nine (AL, AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, OH, SD, TN) have no requirement. Check your state.

Can I email a pay stub to an employee instead of printing it?