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Are there any payroll taxes on top of that salary number? Where I live (Belgium) there's a 33% (probably being lowered to 25% soon) social security tax paid by the employer.

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In the US your employer pays around 15% of your salary as tax. If you're not working for someone else that's an extra 15.3% you have to pay - it's called "self employment tax".

It's not an extra 15%. The total amount of Social Security and Medicare taxes is 15.4%, with the employer paying half and the employee paying the other half. When you're self-employed, you pay both halves. And the employer half is always deductible on your federal income tax, which reduces the sting a little.

Good actual data, though the total figure is 15.3%

NB: it drops to 2.9% (just the employer/employee portion of Medicare) after the cap, which is currently $118,500 for both 2015 and 2016. And then the employee portion of Medicare rises by 0.9% above $200K, but that's not specific to self-employment as it's the employee portion only.

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