The calculators
11 of them, for the 2026-27 tax year, grouped by the question people arrive with rather than by the tax that answers it. Nobody searches for "personal allowance taper" — they search for why a pay rise made almost no difference.
What am I actually left with?
The starting point, and the one most people only need once — until they change job, region, pension or hours.
- Take-home pay
- Salary in at whatever frequency you are paid, everything out at every frequency. Handles all five student loan plans, three ways of paying a pension, overtime, a bonus in the month it lands, dividends and property income — and shows the row every other calculator hides, which is what your employer pays on top.
- What salary do I need?
- The same calculation run backwards, from the take-home pay you want to the gross that produces it. Solved against the engine rather than by dividing by a percentage, which is the method that fails in exactly the band where being wrong is expensive.
- Self-employed
- Income tax and Class 4 on sole trader profits, where Class 2 leaves you, and the payments on account that make a first January bill half again as large as anyone budgeted for.
Why did that pay rise disappear?
Every one of these is a band where the rate on your next pound is far above anything HMRC publishes. They are the reason this site exists.
- The 60% trap
- Between £100,000 and £125,140 the Personal Allowance is withdrawn as you earn, so each extra pound is taxed twice over. The rate goes back down above it, which is why a rise through this band can be worth less than one above it.
- Child benefit charge
- A clawback that behaves like a tax rate and is not one, so it appears in no table of rates. How much of it a pension contribution can undo, and where the escape point is on your numbers.
- Student loan
- Which plan you are on, what it costs, and why payroll only ever operates one undergraduate plan at a time — plus a postgraduate loan alongside it, not instead of it.
Would a different choice leave me better off?
Same money, different arrangement, materially different answer.
- Pension tax relief
- Salary sacrifice, net pay and relief at source produce three different take-home figures for the identical contribution, and only one of them also cuts your student loan repayment. Most people do not know which one their employer uses.
- Bonus
- A lump sum usually costs less National Insurance than the same money spread across the year, because NI is assessed per pay period. Income tax works the opposite way round and does not care at all.
- Scotland vs England
- Six bands rather than three, applied to earned income only — savings and dividends stay on the rest-of-UK rates, and on the rest-of-UK thresholds, even for a Scottish taxpayer.
- Compare tax years
- The same salary through two years of rules, so the difference is a calculation rather than a headline. In England it usually reads zero — and the page explains why that is not the same as nothing having happened.
How do these hours turn into that salary?
Most people know a rate, a shift pattern or a fraction of a post, not an annual figure.
- Hourly rate and pro-rata
- Hourly, daily and part-time pay annualised properly, including the part that surprises people: a pro-rata salary is taxed as the pro-rata amount, so a part-time worker often keeps a larger share of it than the full-time rate suggests.
What all of them do that most calculators do not
Every result opens up into the arithmetic that produced it, step by step, with each step naming the rule it applied and the gov.uk or gov.scot page that rule was read from. That is a property of the engine rather than something each page writes out afterwards — a re-derived explanation can drift from the number it is explaining, and here the stepsare the calculation.
Every one of them also reports a marginal rate: the share of your next pound lost to deductions, rather than the average across everything you earn. At £110,000 in England that figure is 62%, which appears in no published table of rates and is the single most useful number on any of these pages. Where every figure comes from, including the ones that could not be confirmed.
Why there are 11 and not eight hundred
The obvious way to build a site like this is a page per salary, a page per job title and a page per city. It is cheap, it fills a sitemap, and it is the precise pattern search engines now assess as scaled content — the largest competitor in this niche has over three thousand URLs, most of them one template with a variable substituted in, and effectively no visibility on Google at all.
So the salaries people search for are answered as rows on the calculator that computes them, linking back into it as a parameter rather than as a URL of their own. The take-home page carries that table, with the answer written out beside each one. It is a decision that cannot be reversed cheaply once pages have been indexed, which is why it was made on the first day rather than the day it became inconvenient.