What salary do I need?
Enter the take-home pay you want. This works backwards to the gross salary that produces it — by running the 2026-27 calculation repeatedly rather than by applying a percentage, which is the only way to get it right near a threshold.
Gross salary needed
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Next £1 in hand costs:—
How this was worked out
Figures use published 2026-27 rates, last verified 2026-08-08. See where every number comes from.
Why you cannot just divide by a percentage
The usual approach to this question is to take someone's known take-home percentage and divide. It works until it badly does not, because the share of gross pay you keep is not a constant — it falls as pay rises, and in one band it falls off a cliff.
In 2026-27 a rest-of-UK taxpayer wanting £1,500 a month keeps about 90% of their gross pay. Wanting £5,000 a month they keep about 70%. Apply the first figure to the second target and you will name a salary thousands of pounds short — in a negotiation you only get to have once.
| Take-home wanted | Salary needed, rUK | Salary needed, Scotland | Share kept |
|---|---|---|---|
| £1,500 a month | £20,112 | £20,057 | 90% |
| £2,000 a month | £28,445 | £28,390 | 84% |
| £2,500 a month | £36,778 | £36,825 | 82% |
| £3,000 a month | £45,112 | £45,953 | 80% |
| £4,000 a month | £64,556 | £67,844 | 74% |
| £5,000 a month | £85,246 | £90,080 | 70% |
No student loan, no pension, standard tax code. Every gross figure in this table was solved by the same engine the calculator above uses, at the moment this page was built.
The band where the answer stops behaving
Between £100,000 and £125,140 of income, the Personal Allowance is withdrawn as you earn. Each extra pound of salary is taxed at the headline rate and costs you part of your tax-free allowance, so the effective rate on that stretch is far above anything published.
Run backwards, that band is where the answers get strange. A target that lands inside it needs a startling amount of extra gross pay, and a target slightly beyond it can need barely more salary than one comfortably inside — because the expensive stretch has already been paid for. The box marked "next £1 in hand costs" above is where you can see it: it moves as you change the target, and in that band it roughly doubles. The trap has its own calculator, which approaches the same arithmetic from the other direction.
The child benefit charge does the same thing lower down the income scale, and a pension contribution is the usual way out of both — which is why the pension box on this page changes the answer by more than the contribution itself.
Three places this question actually comes from
- A number to ask for
- People know what they need to clear each month, not what to write in the salary box. Going in with a gross figure derived from a rule of thumb is how a request lands short of what it was meant to cover.
- A mortgage affordability gap
- Lenders assess gross income; households budget net. Working out which gross salary produces the monthly figure a budget needs is the translation between the two, and it is not a fixed multiple.
- Going part-time, or contracting
- A day rate or a reduced week has to clear the same bills. Solving for the annual equivalent first, then dividing by the days actually worked, gets there — and the hourly and pro-rata calculator does the second half.
What this does not include
- Anything deducted after tax that is not modelled here — union fees, season ticket loans, a car scheme, court orders. Add them to your target before solving.
- Employer benefits with a taxable value. Those raise your tax bill without raising the amount paid to you, so a salary solved here would leave you short. The main calculator takes them as an input.
- Any income that is not employment earnings. Savings interest, dividends and rental income are taxed under different rules, and in Scotland under different rates again.
Working backwards from what you need
- What salary do I need to take home a specific amount?
- More than the target plus a fixed percentage, because the deductions on the last slice of pay are heavier than on the first. The gap grows as the target rises, which is why working backwards has to be done through the whole calculation rather than by dividing by a rate.
- Why is the salary I need so much higher than my target?
- Because the extra pay needed to close the gap is itself taxed at your marginal rate, and if it crosses a threshold on the way it is taxed harder still. Around the Personal Allowance taper the required salary climbs steeply for a small increase in what you keep.
- Does this include National Insurance and student loan?
- Yes, and both change the answer materially. A student loan repayment on top of tax and National Insurance can add thousands to the salary required for the same take-home, which is why a target set without it is usually short.
- Should I negotiate on gross or net pay?
- On gross, because that is what an employer can actually offer — but decide what you want using the net figure. The point of working backwards is to walk into the conversation knowing which gross number produces the life you were planning.