UK Take-Home Pay Calculator

The salary written in a UK job offer is never what lands in your bank account. Every payslip run through PAYE (Pay As You Earn) subtracts Income Tax and National Insurance before you see a penny, and, if they apply to you, a workplace pension contribution and student loan repayment come off too. This calculator estimates that gap for the 2026/27 tax year (6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027) using rates confirmed directly against gov.uk as of August 2026, for taxpayers in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (rUK). Scotland uses an entirely separate income tax structure with six bands instead of three, so this calculator does not cover it.

How Income Tax is worked out

Income Tax starts with the Personal Allowance: the first £12,570 of your income is tax-free. Above that, a 20% basic rate applies up to £50,270 of total income, 40% (higher rate) applies from there up to £125,140, and 45% (additional rate) applies above that. These bands are usually quoted as gross-income figures because they assume you keep the full Personal Allowance. The underlying rule is really about taxable income after the allowance is subtracted, which matters once the allowance itself starts shrinking. In taxable-income terms, the basic-rate band itself is £37,700 wide, and the higher-rate band runs up to £112,570 of taxable income. The familiar £50,270 and £125,140 figures are just those same boundaries with the £12,570 allowance added back.

That shrinking is where the calculator's biggest warning sign lives. Once your adjusted net income passes £100,000, your Personal Allowance is reduced by £1 for every £2 you earn above that threshold, reaching zero entirely at £125,140. Because you're already a higher-rate taxpayer in this zone, every extra £2 of income does double duty: it's taxed at 40% itself, and it also drags £1 of previously tax-free allowance into the 40% band. Combined with the 2% National Insurance rate that applies above the Upper Earnings Limit, the effective marginal rate across most of the £100,000–£125,140 band works out to roughly 62%, higher than the top 45% additional rate that only kicks in well above £125,140. It's widely nicknamed the '60% tax trap', and it's the single most common thing this calculator's users are trying to understand about their own payslip.

National Insurance and student loans

National Insurance is a separate system from Income Tax, funding different things (notably your entitlement to the State Pension and contributory benefits), and it behaves differently too. Employee Class 1 National Insurance is 0% up to the Primary Threshold of £12,570, 8% between there and the Upper Earnings Limit of £50,270, and then only 2% above that: a lower rate on top-end earnings, not a higher one, which is the opposite of how Income Tax behaves and a frequent source of confusion when people try to estimate their own take-home pay by hand.

Student loan repayments work like a targeted graduate tax rather than a conventional loan repayment: you pay a fixed percentage of income above a plan-specific threshold, regardless of your remaining balance, and any unpaid balance is written off after a set number of years. Plan 1, Plan 2, Plan 4 (for Scottish-domiciled students), and Plan 5 all take 9% of income above their respective thresholds (for 2026/27, the Plan 2 threshold, which is the most common, is £29,385 a year), while a Postgraduate Loan takes 6% above a lower threshold. A Postgraduate Loan can also run alongside an undergraduate plan at the same time, each calculated independently. This calculator only lets you select one plan at a time, so if you're repaying both an undergraduate and a postgraduate loan simultaneously, add the two repayment amounts together yourself using this calculator run twice.

Limits of this calculator

A few simplifications are worth knowing. Real PAYE withholding is calculated per pay period on a cumulative basis rather than as a clean annual figure, so bonuses or uneven pay can shift your actual monthly deduction away from this estimate. Pension contributions are assumed to use the 'net pay' method (deducted before tax), not salary sacrifice. Under salary sacrifice your National Insurance would also be reduced, which this calculator doesn't model. And other reliefs like Marriage Allowance, Gift Aid, or Blind Person's Allowance aren't included, even though they can technically affect the £100,000 taper calculation via 'adjusted net income'.

Your tax code and the documents behind it

The letters and digits printed on your payslip decide how much of that allowance your employer actually applies, and they are the first thing to check when this estimate and your real pay disagree. HMRC issues code 1257L to most people with a single job and the full Personal Allowance. BR taxes every pound of that job at the basic rate, D0 at the higher rate, and 0T assumes no allowance at all, which is what a new employer falls back on when your P45 has not arrived yet. A code starting with S means Scottish rates are being applied and one starting with C means Welsh rates, which the Senedd sets separately each year and which are worth checking against this estimate rather than assuming they match. A wrong code does not change what you owe for the year, only when you pay it, because HMRC squares the difference later through a revised code or a P800 calculation after the year ends.

Two documents anchor the year for anyone paid through PAYE. Your P60 arrives after 5 April and summarises everything that employer deducted over the year; your P45 is what you get when you leave a job partway through, and passing it to the next employer is what keeps the cumulative calculation from restarting from scratch. Most employees never file a Self Assessment return at all, because cumulative PAYE is designed to land on the correct annual figure by the final payday of the year. Self Assessment becomes compulsory in specific situations instead, such as untaxed income from self-employment or property, and the taper zone above £100,000 is one of the points where a payslip question quietly turns into a tax return question.

Checking this against a real payslip

The practical next step is to hold this figure against one real payslip and read three lines in order: the tax code, whether the pension deduction is labelled net pay or salary sacrifice, and whether a student loan line appears and matches the plan you selected here. If all three agree and the numbers still differ, the cause is usually timing rather than error. A bonus, a mid-year pay rise or a month with extra hours moves the cumulative calculation temporarily, and it settles again by the following April.