Kitchen Assistant Take-Home Pay Calculator 2026

From £12.41 an hour to a yearly figure

The conversion is hourly rate × weekly hours × 52, and in this occupation the hours do more work than the rate. £12.41 at 37.5 hours is £24,199.50 a year — the figure the calculator starts from. At 20 hours it is £12,906.40; at 25 hours, £16,133.00; at 30 hours, £19,359.60; at 40 hours, £25,812.80. Same median rate, five different salaries: the rota is the pay offer as much as the rate is.

Through the 2026/27 England model with auto-enrolment on, the 37.5-hour baseline becomes £1,691.39 a month of take-home — £20,296.70 a year, £390.32 a week — after £897.98 of pension, £2,146.30 of income tax and £858.52 of National Insurance. The worked example below shows every line. Part-time figures scale down through the same engine: the calculator rebuilds the whole deduction stack from whatever gross you enter, so the monthly figure for your actual hours is the one to budget from.

Use the conversion in reverse on job adverts. A £20,000 salary on a 30-hour rota is £12.82 an hour — above the £12.41 median. A £20,000 salary on a 37.5-hour rota is £10.26 an hour — below the adult legal floor of £12.71, and unlawful for a worker aged 21 or over. The advert quotes the figure that flatters the rota; divide it down to the hour before you compare it to anything.

Part-time hours: enter your actual hours

The calculator opens on the £24,199.50 full-time figure, but the median kitchen assistant works about 19.3 hours a week — so most users should change the gross first. Work out your real pattern: contracted hours plus the regular extras, averaged over a month. A 20-hour contract with a regular Saturday double that averages 24 hours is a 24-hour gross, not a 20-hour one: £12.41 × 24 × 52 = £15,487.68.

Zero-hours workers should average the last twelve weeks — the same reference period employment law uses for a week's pay — and enter that. If the rota swings between 12 and 28 hours, the 20-hour average is the honest input, and the monthly take-home it returns is the figure to budget from rather than the best week's version.

One thing not to do: annualise the £239.00 weekly median and enter £12,428 as if it were a salary. That figure is the median worker's actual earnings at median hours — it describes the occupation, but your gross is your rate times your hours, and the calculator needs yours.

Tronc payments are taxable earnings: include them in the gross

Tronc shares, card tips routed through the employer and any service-charge distributions are wages for tax purposes: income tax applies, auto-enrolment pension applies, and they belong in the gross you enter. A kitchen assistant on the £24,199.50 baseline receiving a typical modest tronc share of, say, £40 a month (£480 a year) should enter £24,679.50 — the calculator then taxes the tronc slice exactly as it taxes the wages.

One wrinkle is worth knowing before you enter the gross: where an independent troncmaster allocates the tronc — someone outside the employer running the distribution — no employer or employee Class 1 National Insurance is due on the tronc money, though income tax still applies. This calculator applies employee NI to the whole gross, so on the tronc slice it very slightly overstates the NI for independent-tronc arrangements. The difference is small — 8% of a modest monthly tronc share — but it is real, and it belongs to you, not the calculator.

What stays out of the gross: nothing else, really. Kitchen pay has no tax-free allowances of the kind drivers get for nights out — the wage, the tronc and the tips are all taxable, and the honest gross is all of them added together.

The Scotland toggle and the lower bands

North of the border the bands change: Scotland taxes income at 19%, 20%, 21%, 42%, 45% and 48% across six thresholds, while National Insurance, the £12,570 personal allowance and auto-enrolment pension stay UK-wide. At the £24,199.50 baseline the Scottish setup is a touch kinder than England's flat 20% — the 19% starter band on the first slice of taxable income leaves a Scottish kitchen assistant marginally better off each month.

The difference is small at this level of earnings — the 19% band only covers the first £2,827 of taxable income above the personal allowance. It is still worth toggling: the nation switch under the calculator applies the Scottish bands automatically, and the monthly figure it returns is the one your payslip will show if you pay Scottish income tax.

The boundary that matters at kitchen-assistant earnings is not a higher-rate threshold but the personal allowance itself. Part-timers earning under £12,570 pay no income tax at all — the calculator shows this automatically — though National Insurance and auto-enrolment pension have their own thresholds and still apply above them. A 16-hour week at the median (£10,325.12 a year) pays no income tax; the deductions are pension and NI only.

What the median does not tell you

The £12.41 median is the middle of every kitchen and catering assistant on a payroll: school kitchens and fine dining, London and the regions, the forty-year-old prep cook and the seventeen-year-old pot-washer. It does not split any of that out. Geography moves it, the type of kitchen moves it, and age moves it — the under-21s in the sample are the reason the median sits below the adult floor.

It also leaves out the self-employed entirely: ASHE covers employees, so agency chefs and freelance kitchen staff are not in the £12.41. And it says nothing about the tronc, which varies from nothing in a café with no tipping to a meaningful monthly addition in a busy restaurant — the median is the wage line only, and the tronc is where two identical £12.41 jobs can diverge.

Read the median as a starting point and a negotiating reference, not a verdict. Offered £12.41 for a split-shift week with an unpaid gap and no tronc, the median says the rate is typical and the package is thin. Offered £12.80 for straight shifts with a tronc, the rate beats the median and the package beats it by more.

How the tax engine works

The worked example runs the £24,199.50 median through the 2026/27 England model in deduction order. First the pension: 5% of qualifying earnings (£24,199.50 minus the £6,240 lower limit = £17,959.50), which is £897.98. The model is salary-sacrifice: income tax and National Insurance are charged on pay after the pension comes out, so £24,199.50 − £897.98 = £23,301.52 of taxable pay. Income tax is 20% of pay above the £12,570 personal allowance: (£23,301.52 − £12,570) × 20% = £2,146.30. Employee National Insurance is 8% between £12,570 and £50,270: (£23,301.52 − £12,570) × 8% = £858.52. Subtract all three from £24,199.50 and the take-home is £20,296.70 — £1,691.39 a month, £390.32 a week. Every figure in the worked example is engine-computed, not estimated.

Reviewed and updated

Pay figures and the worked example were re-checked on 24 September 2026 against the ONS ASHE 2025 provisional release and the 2026/27 England tax model. Put your real rate, your real hours and your real tronc in — a calculator fed with the advert's version of the job returns the advert's version of the pay.