Things people ask.

No. The Take-Home Pay is a friendly approximation to help you understand an offer letter — not a substitute for proper tax advice. The maths is reasonable; HMRC is the source of truth.

2026/27 by default — personal allowance £12,570, basic-rate threshold £50,270, additional-rate threshold £125,140, NI 8% / 2%. You can switch to 2025/26 on the full calculator page.

We assume salary sacrifice — your contribution is deducted from gross before tax and NI are calculated. That means a 5% pension contribution costs you less than 5% of your net pay.

Scotland has its own income tax bands. The homepage uses UK-wide rates. Switch to Scotland on the full calculator page for exact figures.

No. Everything runs in your browser. We collect nothing, store nothing. Clear the page and the numbers disappear with it.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. Full-time employees, annual gross pay. Use it to gut-check, not to negotiate by.

Your income tax personal allowance is £12,570 (2026/27). The basic rate (20%) applies on earnings from £12,571 to £50,270. The higher rate (40%) applies from £50,271 to £125,140. Above £125,140 the additional rate (45%) kicks in. If you earn above £100,000, your personal allowance is tapered — you lose £1 of allowance for every £2 earned above £100,000, creating an effective 60% marginal rate between £100,000 and £125,140.

Salary sacrifice means you contractually reduce your gross salary by the pension amount — this lowers your NI as well as income tax. A net pay arrangement (standard workplace pension) takes your contribution from pre-tax pay, reducing income tax but not NI. Our homepage uses salary sacrifice by default; the full calculator lets you choose either.

If one partner earns below the personal allowance (£12,570) and the other is a basic rate taxpayer, the lower earner can transfer £1,260 of their personal allowance to their partner. This reduces the higher earner's tax by up to £252 per year. Available on the full calculator page.

If either parent earns above £60,000, Child Benefit starts being clawed back at 1% per £200 over that threshold, and is fully withdrawn at £80,000. Our full calculator shows this charge if you enable the Child Benefit option.

The market salary page uses the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) — full-time employees, annual gross pay, for minor groups (3-digit SOC 2020). The homepage benchmark section uses a log-normal distribution fitted to the ONS percentile data to draw the curve.