Starting With the Right Number

Most salary questions come back to one figure: what actually lands in your bank account each month once Income Tax, National Insurance, pension contributions and any student loan repayment have all been taken out. The Take-Home Pay Calculator handles all of these together, while the standalone Income Tax and National Insurance calculators are useful when you want to isolate exactly one deduction — for example, checking how a pay rise affects your tax band without pension contributions muddying the comparison.

A tax code that doesn't match your circumstances is one of the more common, quietly expensive mistakes — an outdated code can mean paying more tax than necessary for months before it's corrected. The Tax Code Calculator decodes what your specific code actually means and flags common issues, including the K-code situation where untaxed benefits push your taxable income above your salary itself.

Scottish taxpayers use a genuinely different band structure to the rest of the UK, with five bands instead of three — our calculators account for this directly rather than treating the whole UK as one uniform system, since applying rest-of-UK rates to a Scottish salary would give a meaningfully wrong answer.