Taxable income calculator

What taxable income actually is

Taxable income = total income − Personal Allowance. Total income means everything HMRC counts across every source: salary before deductions, self-employment profit, rent, interest outside ISAs, dividends. The Personal Allowance takes the first £12,570 out of reach in 2026/27, and what remains is the figure the tax bands are applied to, slice by slice.

Two distinctions stop most of the confusion. Taxable income is not your salary, because other income stacks on top and because some payroll deductions come out before tax while others come out after. And taxable is not the same as taxed: savings interest sits inside taxable income yet the Personal Savings Allowance can charge the first £1,000 of it at 0%, and the first £500 of dividends gets the same treatment. The word taxable tells you the bands apply. It doesn't tell you the rate is above zero.

What never counts

Some money stays outside the calculation entirely: anything earned inside an ISA, the first £1,000 of trading income under the trading allowance and the same for property income, Premium Bond prizes, lottery winnings, and most gifts between individuals. The distinction matters when you're near a threshold, because £2,000 of ISA interest changes nothing while £2,000 of ordinary interest can drag your allowance or push a band.

The mistakes people make working it out

The classic is treating gross salary as the whole answer and forgetting the side income, the rent or the interest that stacks on top of it. Second is the pension method mix-up: salary sacrifice and net pay contributions come out before tax and shrink taxable income directly, while a personal pension paid from your bank does something different, extending your basic-rate band and reducing adjusted net income rather than the taxable figure itself. Third is missing Gift Aid entirely, when donations count at 125% of what you gave against the £100,000 taper and the Child Benefit charge. And fourth is stopping at income tax, when National Insurance takes its own slice from earnings on rules of its own. The take-home pay calculator handles all four properly when you want the full bill rather than the taxable figure.

How this compares with GOV.UK's own tool

HMRC's Check your Income Tax service does something this page can't: it reads your actual tax code and employer data, so it shows what HMRC currently expects to collect from you specifically. Its limits are the flip side of that design. It needs a Government Gateway login, it covers PAYE employment and pensions only, and if Self Assessment is your only route, the self-employed included, it isn't for you. Use the official service to check what HMRC believes about your current position; use this page and the calculators around it to model scenarios the official tool can't, a pay rise, a second income, going over £100,000, or the same salary in Scotland. The two answer different questions, and the well-run household occasionally asks both.