What's my take-home pay?

How take-home pay is worked out in 2026/27

Before your salary gets anywhere near your bank account, payroll has already had its turn. Income tax comes off, National Insurance comes off, and if you've got a student loan or a pension, those come off too. The system is called PAYE, Pay As You Earn, and it's built so you never actually handle the money you owe. Efficient, certainly. Also the reason barely anyone in Britain can tell you what they pay in tax. You never see it go.

Income tax works in slices. The first £12,570 is your Personal Allowance and stays untaxed. Then:

Here is the bit people get wrong. Only the slice inside a band is taxed at that band's rate, so tipping into the 40% band does not put 40% on everything. On £51,000, precisely £730 of your salary is taxed at the higher rate. The rest carries on exactly as before. (Scotland runs its own bands on earned income. Pick Scotland in the calculator and it does the honours, and the Scottish bands reference charts every rate since devolution.)

National Insurance is the quieter deduction, but it isn't small: 8% of everything between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% above that. One quirk worth knowing. NI is worked out on each payslip by itself rather than across the year, which is why a one-off bonus attracts less NI than the same money paid as a rise.

The whole machine in one line: take-home pay = gross salary − income tax − National Insurance − student loan repayments − your own pension contributions. Everything below is that sentence with the numbers filled in.

A worked example: £38,000

Take £38,000 in England, no pension, no student loan. Knock off the £12,570 allowance and £25,430 is taxable, all of it at 20%, so income tax comes to £5,086. NI takes 8% of that same £25,430, another £2,034. You're left with £30,880 a year. Call it £2,573 a month.

Now add a 5% pension through salary sacrifice and watch what happens. £1,900 lands in your pension pot, but your take-home only drops by £114 a month, £1,368 over the year. So where did the other £532 come from? It's tax and NI you never paid, because sacrificed salary is never taxed in the first place. It is very hard to buy £1,900 of anything else for £1,368.

Got a Plan 2 student loan? On this salary it takes £775 a year, which is 9% of everything above £29,385, or roughly £65 a month. Every rise after that loses 9p in the pound to the loan before tax and NI have their go, so a £1,000 pay rise puts about £630 in your pocket.

Why your payslip won't quite match

The calculator assumes a standard tax code, 1257L, and a salary that behaves itself. Real payslips are scrappier. HMRC may have adjusted your code for company benefits, for tax underpaid last year, or for a second job, in which case your allowance isn't the standard £12,570 at all. Type your actual code into the calculator and it will use that instead.

Two more classics. Start a job partway through the tax year and the emergency "month 1" basis can overtax you until your code catches up. And the month a bonus lands always looks brutal, because payroll briefly assumes you earn that much every month. It sorts itself out over the following payslips. Nobody warns you, so consider yourself warned.

Checking the answer against HMRC

You can see what HMRC actually expects to collect from you this year by signing into the official Check your Income Tax service with a Government Gateway login. It pulls your live tax code and the pay your employer has reported, so it knows things this page can't: the adjusted code, the company car, last year's underpayment being clawed back. Worth a look once a year even when nothing feels wrong.

What the official service can't do is answer a what-if. It handles employment and pension income under PAYE, nothing self-employed, and it has no way to show what a pay rise, a different pension percentage or a move north of the border would do to your monthly number. Scenarios are this page's job. And when the two disagree about the present, HMRC is right about your tax code, so type that code into the calculator above and the answers converge.

The salaries where the rules change

Three numbers cause most of the trouble. At £50,271 the 40% band begins. From £60,000 the High Income Child Benefit Charge starts clawing back Child Benefit if there are kids in the household, and by £80,000 it has taken the lot. Cross £100,000 and your Personal Allowance itself starts to vanish, £1 of it for every £2 you earn above the line, which quietly pushes the effective rate on that slice to 62% once NI joins in.

Both the Child Benefit charge and the allowance taper are measured on adjusted net income, which pension contributions and Gift Aid donations each reduce, the donation counting at 125% of what left your bank. None of this touches your whole salary, only the slice above each threshold. But near any one of them, a pay rise is worth a good deal less than the number your boss said. The marginal rate calculator maps the whole curve from £0 to £200,000, and if you'd rather dodge the worst of it, the salary sacrifice optimiser shows the tidiest escape route.