UK take-home pay calculator
For the 2026-27 tax year. Handles the Scottish bands, all five student loan plans, and the three ways a pension contribution can be made — each of which produces a different answer.
Take-home pay
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| Per | Year | Month | Week | Day | Hour |
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Marginal rate: —
Effective rate: —Everything taken off, as a share of everything you were paid.
How this was calculated
What this looks like on a payslip
Figures use published 2026-27 rates, last verified 2026-08-08. See where every number comes from.
Why your payslip might not match this
This is the question every take-home calculator gets asked and almost none of them answer. There are three usual reasons, and they are worth knowing because two of them mean you may be paying the wrong amount of tax right now.
Your tax code is not the standard one
A calculator assumes you get the full Personal Allowance. Payroll does not assume — it applies whatever code HMRC has issued you. If yours is a BR code, every pound is taxed at the basic rate with no allowance at all. If it starts with K, you have untaxed income larger than your allowances and the difference is being added to your taxable pay. If it ends in W1, M1 or X, it is an emergency code and each pay period is being taxed in isolation.
Enter your code above and this calculator will follow it instead of the standard rules. Every code, and what each one means.
PAYE is cumulative, this is annual
Your employer works out tax on a running year-to-date basis, giving you one twelfth of your allowances each month. That is why a bonus month or a mid-year pay rise looks wrong on the payslip and then settles down. Over a full year in one job the two approaches agree; within any single month they often do not.
National Insurance is worked out per period
Income tax is annual, but National Insurance is assessed separately in each pay period and never reconciled at year end. That is why the pay-frequency selector above changes the answer once you enter a bonus — and why a lump sum and the same money spread across the year genuinely cost different amounts. The bonus calculator explains that in full.
The pension question that changes the answer most
Most calculators give you one box for pension contributions. There are three different ways an employer can operate them, they produce three different take-home figures for the identical contribution, and most people do not know which one they are on. It is worth finding out — the gap is hundreds of pounds a year.
| Method | Cuts income tax | Cuts National Insurance | Cuts student loan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salary sacrifice | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Net pay arrangement | Yes | No | No |
| Relief at source | Basic rate automatically; higher rate must be claimed | No | No |
The last row is where money goes missing. Under relief at source your provider claims the basic rate back for you, but anything above that you have to ask HMRC for — through Self Assessment or by writing to them. It is not automatic, and it is not small. Compare all three on your own numbers.
And "5%" is usually not 5% of your pay
A minimum auto-enrolment contribution is a percentage of qualifying earnings — the slice of your pay between £6,240 and £50,270 — and not of your whole salary. The two are far apart at the bottom of the range and converge as pay rises, which is why the people who can least afford the difference are the ones it costs most.
On £20,000, 5% of qualifying earnings is £688 a year. 5% of full pay would be £1,000, around 45% more going in. Every calculator offers a percentage box; the calculator above asks which one you mean, because your scheme rules answer it differently depending on whether your employer certified on full pay.
Below £10,000 a year your employer does not have to enrol you at all, though you can still ask to join.
Common salaries, worked out
A standard tax code, no pension and no student loan. Each row opens the calculator above with that salary already in it, so you can add your own circumstances to it rather than starting again. The marginal rate column is the one worth reading: it is what your next pay rise is actually taxed at, and it is not the rate in the headline for most of this table.
| Salary | A month | A year | A month, Scotland | Next £1 taxed at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £20,000 after tax | £1,493 | £17,920 | £1,497 | 28% |
| £25,000 after tax | £1,793 | £21,520 | £1,797 | 28% |
| £30,000 after tax | £2,093 | £25,120 | £2,096 | 28% |
| £35,000 after tax | £2,393 | £28,720 | £2,392 | 28% |
| £40,000 after tax | £2,693 | £32,320 | £2,688 | 28% |
| £45,000 after tax | £2,993 | £35,920 | £2,960 | 28% |
| £50,000 after tax | £3,293 | £39,520 | £3,169 | 28% |
| £60,000 after tax | £3,780 | £45,357 | £3,634 | 42% |
| £70,000 after tax | £4,263 | £51,157 | £4,101 | 42% |
| £80,000 after tax | £4,746 | £56,957 | £4,555 | 42% |
| £100,000 after tax | £5,713 | £68,557 | £5,438 | 62% |
These are rows on one page rather than a page each, on purpose. A separate URL for every salary is the pattern that keeps calculator sites out of Google's results, and it cannot be undone once the pages have been indexed — the reasoning is written down.
Dividends are the top slice, and Scotland does not touch them
Dividends are taxed after everything else, as the highest part of your income. The same £3,000 of dividends costs nothing at one salary and the additional rate at another, so there is no way to work them out without knowing the pay underneath — which is why they are an input here rather than a separate tool.
Two things about them are routinely got wrong. The dividend allowance of £500 is a nil-rate band, not an exemption: it is taxed at 0% but it still uses up band space, so it pushes the dividends above it further up. And Scottish income tax does not apply to dividends at all. A Scottish taxpayer pays the rest-of-UK dividend rates and uses the rest-of-UK band boundaries for them — so the higher dividend rate starts where the UK basic rate limit ends, not where Scotland's own bands do. Set the region to Scotland above and watch the tax on your pay change while the tax on your dividends does not.
Property profit is different again: it is non-savings income, so a Scottish taxpayer pays Scottish rates on it. It carries no National Insurance and does not go through payroll, so it does not drive a student loan deduction either — though it does count towards the allowance taper and the child benefit charge.
What this calculator will not tell you
- It does not know your circumstances. It is an information tool, not financial advice, and it cannot see your tax code history, your P11D, or anything else HMRC holds.
- Benefits in kind are entered as a single taxable value. Working out the taxable value of a company car from its list price and emissions is a separate calculation this does not do.
- Savings interest is included, and the box for it is above — but the Personal Savings Allowance it uses is one of the figures we could not find on a page carrying this tax year's label. It is used, because leaving savings out entirely would be the larger distortion, and it is named openly rather than presented as checked. The unconfirmed list says which figures are in that position.
- Dividends are handled, but tax on them is never collected through PAYE. It is paid through Self Assessment or by a change to your tax code, so it will not appear on the payslip the rest of this page is describing.
- Where a figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, it is not used at all. Those gaps are listed openly on the methodology page rather than filled with a guess.
The cost-to-employ row is an upper bound
The calculator shows what an employer pays to employ you, because it is most of the answer to why a pay rise was smaller than the one you asked for. For a small employer it is a ceiling rather than a figure: the Employment Allowance lets an eligible business set the first £10,500 of employer National Insurance a year against it.
It is claimed once across a whole payroll rather than per person, which is exactly why it cannot be netted off the row above — attributing a business-level allowance to one employee would be arithmetic nobody could reproduce. So it is named here instead: an employer whose allowance is unused pays less to employ you than the line says, and one already using it against other staff pays exactly what the line says.
Payslip questions this page gets asked
- Why does my payslip not match this calculator?
- Three usual reasons, in order of how often they are the answer. Your tax code is not the standard one, and payroll follows the code rather than your circumstances. Your National Insurance is worked out on each pay period separately, so an uneven month is not a twelfth of the year. Or a benefit in kind — a car, medical cover — is being taxed through the code without appearing as pay. Enter your real code above and the first of those disappears.
- How much of a pay rise do I actually keep?
- Whatever is left after the marginal rate shown above, which is rarely the rate in the headlines. A basic rate taxpayer with a student loan keeps less of the next pound than the tax tables suggest, and anyone between £100,000 and the point the Personal Allowance runs out keeps far less. The figure on this page is the one that answers "is the promotion worth it".
- Can earning more ever leave me with less?
- Not through income tax or National Insurance — every band takes a share of the extra, never more than all of it. The genuine cliffs are elsewhere: benefits that stop at a fixed income, and free childcare hours that are lost entirely once adjusted net income crosses their threshold. Those are not modelled here, and they are the only place the answer is yes.
- What is the difference between gross pay and take-home pay?
- Gross pay is what the job is advertised at. Take-home is what reaches your account after income tax, National Insurance, any pension contribution and any student loan repayment. The gap widens as pay rises, which is why comparing two jobs on their gross salaries alone is misleading whenever they sit in different bands.
- Who can claim the Marriage Allowance, and what is it actually worth?
- One of you must earn under the Personal Allowance, the other must pay no more than the basic rate. The lower earner transfers £1,260 of their allowance, and the recipient's bill falls by that amount at the basic rate — a fixed credit, the same anywhere in the UK, including Scotland. It is not extra allowance for the recipient, which is why the working above shows it as a credit line: it can shrink your bill to nothing, but it can never turn into a refund.