Take-Home Pay Calculator

The order the deductions come off

Take-home pay is not gross minus a single percentage. Deductions come off in a strict order, and the order changes the result. Get the order right and the £35,000 example above reconciles to the penny; get it wrong and you will be a few hundred pounds out.

First comes the pension, when it is taken by salary sacrifice. Your employer reduces your contractual salary by the contribution — £1,438 on a £35,000 salary — and pays it into the pension for you. Because your salary is now £33,562 for tax and National Insurance purposes, every later deduction is calculated on the smaller number. This is why the income tax bill is £4,198.40 and not the £4,486 you would get from taxing the full £35,000: (33,562 − 12,570) × 20% = £4,198.40.

Second comes income tax, charged on taxable pay above the personal allowance: 20% from £12,571 to £50,270, 40% to £125,140, and 45% above that in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Third comes employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above — on the salary-sacrificed figure, which is why the NI bill is £1,679.36 and not £1,794.40.

Student loan repayments come last and are calculated on gross salary above your plan threshold, ignoring the pension entirely. That ordering matters: a £35,000 graduate on Plan 2 pays (35,000 − 29,385) × 9% = £505.35 a year even though their pension has reduced their taxable pay.

• Pension by salary sacrifice: reduces salary before tax and National Insurance are calculated.
• Income tax: 20%, 40% and 45% on taxable pay above the £12,570 personal allowance (England, Wales, Northern Ireland).
• Employee National Insurance: 8% from £12,570 to £50,270, then 2% above.
• Student loan: 9% of gross salary above your plan threshold, calculated after everything else.

Scotland vs England: the same salary, different tax

Scotland sets its own income tax bands, and there are six of them against England's three rates. The Scottish starter rate of 19% looks generous, but the higher rate of 42% kicks in at £43,663 — more than £6,600 below England's £50,271 — and the advanced rate of 45% starts at £75,001. The net effect is that Scotland costs more at almost every income above the low twenties.

The engine's verified run makes it concrete. On £40,000 in Scotland: pension £1,688, income tax £5,196.59, National Insurance £2,059.36, take-home £31,056.05 (£2,588.00 a month). Worked from the published English bands, the same £40,000 would pay (40,000 − 1,688 − 12,570) × 20% = £5,148.40 in income tax — £48.19 less. That gap is small at £40,000 and grows with every pay rise, because the Scottish 42% band arrives well before England's 40% band.

If you moved from Manchester to Glasgow on the same salary and your take-home dropped, this is why. And if you are comparing job offers across the border, compare take-home, never gross.

• England, Wales, Northern Ireland: 20% to £50,270, 40% to £125,140, 45% above.
• Scotland: 19%, 20%, 21%, 42% from £43,663, 45% from £75,001, 48% above £125,140.
• At £40,000 the Scottish bands cost £48.19 more income tax than the English bands on the engine's model.
• National Insurance and pension rules are identical across the UK — only income tax differs.

The £100,000 taper trap

Above £100,000 the personal allowance is withdrawn at £1 of allowance for every £2 of income, and it is gone entirely at £125,140. The result is the notorious 60% effective marginal rate between £100,000 and £125,140: you pay 40% income tax plus the lost allowance, which is worth another 20%.

The arithmetic is worth seeing once. At £110,000, the withdrawn allowance is (110,000 − 100,000) ÷ 2 = £5,000, so your personal allowance is 12,570 − 5,000 = £7,570. An extra £1,000 of salary in this zone therefore costs you £400 of higher-rate tax plus £200 of lost allowance — £600 on £1,000 before National Insurance.

This is also the zone where salary sacrifice earns its keep. Sacrificing salary into your pension to stay under £100,000 preserves the full allowance and avoids the 60% trap entirely — one of the few places in the tax system where the maths actively rewards you for earning less on paper.

• Taper starts at £100,000; the allowance is fully withdrawn at £125,140.
• At £110,000 your personal allowance is £7,570, not £12,570.
• The effective marginal rate between £100,000 and £125,140 is 60% before National Insurance.
• Salary-sacrificed pension contributions reduce the income counted for the taper.

Why your payslip and this calculator can differ

A calculator works from the published rules; your payslip works from your circumstances. The most common reason for a mismatch is your tax code. Anything other than 1257L — because of a company car, medical insurance, underpaid tax from a previous year, or a second job — changes the allowance the calculator assumes and moves every number downstream.

Timing matters too. PAYE spreads your annual allowance across pay periods, so someone who starts a job in October gets larger monthly allowances than someone who has been employed since April. Bonuses and overtime are taxed as ordinary earnings in the month they are paid, which can push a single payslip into a higher band even when your annual salary sits comfortably in the basic rate.

Then there is the pension method. This calculator models salary sacrifice, which reduces National Insurance as well as income tax. If your employer uses the net-pay arrangement instead, your income tax is the same but your National Insurance is higher, because NI is calculated on the full salary. Check your payslip: if the pension line reduces your taxable pay for NI, you are on salary sacrifice.

• Check your tax code first — anything other than 1257L changes the result.
• Mid-year starters get bigger monthly allowances; bonuses can spike a single month into a higher band.
• Net-pay pensions cost more National Insurance than salary-sacrifice pensions.
• Benefits in kind, second jobs and student loans are all payslip-specific.

The freeze that quietly raises your tax

The Autumn Budget 2025 froze the personal allowance and all income tax thresholds until 5 April 2031. No threshold has moved since, and none will for the rest of the decade. Every pay rise you get between now and then drags a little more of your income into tax, or into a higher band — the Treasury calls it fiscal drag, and it is the reason your gross can rise while your take-home barely moves.

The freeze bites hardest at the boundaries. Someone on £48,000 who gets a 5% rise crosses £50,270 and starts paying 40% on the slice above it. Someone on £98,000 who gets the same rise enters the £100,000 taper zone. The calculator applies the frozen thresholds automatically, so the number you see already includes the drag.

It also means the 2026/27 figures on this page stay valid longer than usual. When thresholds moved every year, last year's calculator was last year's news. With the freeze in place to 2031, the model only needs updating when the rules themselves change — which is exactly what the pay-rise alerts are for.

What it covers, and what it does not

This calculator handles private-sector employees paid through PAYE in the United Kingdom. It models income tax for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, employee Class 1 National Insurance, auto-enrolment pension contributions by salary sacrifice, and optional student loan repayments across all five plans.

It does not cover the self-employed, who pay different National Insurance, or company directors taking dividends — dividend tax rose by 2 percentage points from 6 April 2026, to 10.75%, 35.75% and 39.35%, and director finances need a different tool. It does not model benefits in kind, share schemes, or the High Income Child Benefit Charge.

Every figure on this page is worked from the published 2026/27 rates and reconciled against the engine's verified outputs. The two worked examples above — £35,000 in England and £40,000 in Scotland — are the model's own test cases, and they balance to the penny. If a future Budget changes the rules, this page is updated and the review date below is moved.