Privacy

Your salary, your tax code, your pension contributions, how many children you claim Child Benefit for, which student loan plan you are on. All of it is entered into a form, calculated by code running in your own browser, and displayed back to you. None of it is transmitted, logged or stored anywhere. This is not a promise about how carefully the data is handled — it is a statement that the data is never collected in the first place.

That is a property of how the site is built rather than a policy decision that could quietly change. The calculators are static files with no server behind them to send anything to.

This site uses Google Analytics to count page views, so that time goes into writing the pages people actually read. It records things like which page you are on, roughly where in the world you are, and what kind of device you used. It does not receive anything you typed into a calculator.

Consent controls what is stored, not whether the script runs. The Analytics script loads on every page with every storage category switched off. No cookie is written, no identifier is saved on your device, and nothing is read back from it, unless and until you say yes.

Being straight about what that leaves: before you answer, one request does reach Google. It carries the page address and your IP, from which an approximate location is derived, and it is anonymous — there is no cookie or identifier attached, so it cannot be joined up with any other visit you make, here or anywhere else. If that is not something you want, decline and it stops.

If you say yes, Google Analytics sets cookies so a returning visit can be recognised as the same person. IP addresses are anonymised. Google acts as a data processor and its own terms apply to what it does with the data.

This site did originally refuse to load the script at all before consent. It was changed because the cost turned out to be higher than expected — Google's own tooling reads a site's HTML to check a tag is installed and reported this one as missing, and with no tag running there is no way to account for the visitors who decline. The change is recorded in the changelog.

One entry in your browser's local storage, recording whether you said yes or no and when. It is there so you are not asked again on every page. Recording a refusal should not itself require setting the kind of thing that was refused, which is why it is local storage rather than a cookie.

If you say yes, Google Analytics also sets its own cookies. If you say no, or if you have not answered yet, it does not — it is running, but every storage category is denied, so it has nothing to write with.