Payslip PDFs in Laravel

Why payslips become PDFs

A payslip is a personal financial record an employee keeps, uses to apply for credit, and expects to be able to open years later. That is the difference between a document and a view of a database, and it is why HR and payroll teams keep asking for this.

What a payslip has to carry

Before any of the code below matters, the template has to produce a document that is actually a payslip. These are the fields that make it one, and the ones a reader or an auditor will look for first.

• gross pay, itemised by basic, overtime and any allowances
• each deduction named separately with its own amount
• net pay, which is the number the employee checks first
• year-to-date totals for gross, tax and net
• the pay period and the payment date, which are not the same day
• the employee identifier and tax reference

Turning your Blade template into a document

You already have the markup. View("invoices.pdf", $data)->render() gives you it as a string, which is the only input the render needs. asset() and mix()/vite() emit URLs built from APP_URL. If APP_URL is still http://localhost in the environment that renders, every stylesheet and image in the document silently fails to load and you get a plain-text-looking PDF with no error.

The Laravel implementation

the Http facade is the client most projects here already have. The render happens in a controller returning streamDownload, and you return response()->streamDownload, which never holds the file.

<?php
// app/Http/Controllers/PayslipController.php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\Payslip;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

class PayslipController extends Controller
{
    public function pdf(Payslip $payslip)
    {
        // A Blade view built for print. Do not reuse the on-screen view: it pulls
        // in the app layout and the asset tags, which cannot resolve here.
        $html = view('payslips.pdf', ['payslip' => $payslip])->render();

        $upstream = Http::withToken(config('services.pdfpipe.key'))
            ->timeout(60)
            ->withOptions(['stream' => true])
            ->post('https://api.pdfpipe.xyz/v1/pdf', [
                'html' => $html,
                'options' => ['format' => 'A4', 'printBackground' => true],
            ])
            ->throw();

        return response()->streamDownload(
            fn () => fpassthru($upstream->getBody()->detach()),
            "payslip-{$payslip->reference}.pdf",
            ['Content-Type' => 'application/pdf'],
        );
    }
}

The CSS that makes a payslip page correctly

The layout problem specific to this document is that gross, deductions and net must be visible together without scrolling or breaking, on one page, every time. These rules handle it.

/* Gross, deductions and net have to be visible together. One page,
   every time, regardless of how many deduction lines there are. */
.payslip { break-inside: avoid; }
.summary { break-inside: avoid; }

@page { size: A4; margin: 15mm; }

What goes wrong in Laravel

Blade views for PDFs get built by copying the on-screen view, which brings @vite, the app layout and the Livewire scripts with it. Those either fail to resolve or render as visible artefacts. Start the PDF view from an empty file.

What people try first

Most Laravel projects reach for barryvdh/laravel-dompdf, which is convenient because it installs with Composer and needs nothing else, and limiting because dompdf implements its own layout engine with no support for flexbox or grid. That works until it is running on more than one machine, at which point the browser becomes the thing you operate rather than the thing you use.

Where the payslip lives afterwards

Rendering is the short part. Payslips are personal financial records the employee will need for credit applications and tax filings for years. Employers commonly retain them for six years, and employees expect to be able to download an old one long after they have left.

Getting the document right

• Check net pay and the deduction breakdown, which is what an employee checks first and complains about immediately.
• Generation is triggered by a payroll run, producing every employee's document at once, so size the timeout for that path rather than for a health check.
• This is a batch shape: render the run through the batch endpoint rather than firing thousands of individual requests.
• Backgrounds are painted by default here, so a design that uses colour needs nothing set. Only an explicit print_background of false turns them off.

Frequently asked

Related

Other Laravel documents, and the same payslip in other stacks.