Take-Home Pay Calculator
Your gross salary is not what actually lands in your bank account — Income Tax, National Insurance, pension contributions and any student loan repayment all come out first. This calculator brings all of these together, working out your exact annual, monthly and weekly take-home pay from a single gross figure, using current 2026/27 rates.
Take-Home Pay Calculator
Calculate your exact take-home pay after tax and NI for 2026/27.
Based on 2026/27 UK tax rates. Does not include employer NI.
The Pension Assumption Worth Understanding
This calculator treats your pension contribution the way a “net pay” or salary sacrifice arrangement works — deducted before Income Tax and National Insurance are calculated, reducing both. This is genuinely how many workplace pensions operate, but not all of them: a “relief at source” pension instead deducts your contribution after tax has already been calculated, with basic-rate tax relief added back into the pension separately, and critically, without reducing your National Insurance at all. On a £45,000 salary with a 5% pension contribution, this distinction is worth roughly £180 a year in take-home pay — genuinely small in isolation, but a real, structural difference worth knowing which type applies to you specifically, particularly on a larger salary or contribution percentage where the gap widens further.
Checking your specific pension scheme’s payslip wording, or asking your payroll or HR team directly, confirms which type genuinely applies to you — this is worth doing once rather than assuming, since the two arrangements produce a genuinely different take-home figure for an identical contribution percentage.
Why “Effective Tax Rate” Is the Number Worth Watching
The effective tax rate this calculator shows — combined Income Tax and National Insurance as a percentage of your gross salary — is a genuinely useful single figure for tracking how your overall tax burden changes as your salary rises, since it captures the combined effect of both progressive systems together rather than either in isolation. This figure rises meaningfully at specific points — crossing into the higher-rate tax band, and separately, crossing the National Insurance upper earnings limit — which is worth understanding if you are considering the true marginal cost of a pay rise that crosses one of these specific thresholds.
This is particularly worth checking before accepting a pay rise or new job offer that sits close to one of these threshold points, since the genuine increase in your take-home pay can be meaningfully smaller than the headline salary increase would suggest, once the higher effective rate on the additional income is properly accounted for.
Seeing the Effective Rate Climb
A £45,000 salary carries an effective tax rate of roughly 20.2%. At £55,000 — just crossed into higher-rate territory — this rises to roughly 22.8%. By £100,000, it reaches roughly 31.4%, and climbs considerably faster still just above this point as the Personal Allowance begins tapering away. This is not a steady, linear climb; it accelerates at specific thresholds, which is exactly why the effective rate figure is worth checking at your own specific salary rather than assuming a simple straight-line relationship between income and tax burden.
Entering an Hourly Rate Comes With a Built-In Assumption
If you enter your pay as an hourly rate, this calculator annualises it assuming a standard 40-hour week across all 52 weeks of the year — a reasonable default, but one worth checking against your own actual working pattern, since genuine part-time hours, unpaid leave, or a working pattern meaningfully different from 40 hours a week would produce a different real annual figure than this default assumption. If your actual hours differ meaningfully from this default, entering your genuine expected annual salary directly, rather than an hourly rate, gives a more accurate result for your specific circumstances.
This matters most for anyone on genuinely variable hours, or anyone who takes meaningful unpaid leave during the year — for a standard full-time contract with paid annual leave already built into the salary, the 40-hour, 52-week assumption is a reasonable, accurate approximation.
Bringing Every Deduction Into One Place
The genuine value of this calculator over checking Income Tax, National Insurance and student loan repayments separately is seeing how they interact on your actual gross figure together, since your student loan and pension both use your gross salary as their starting point, and changing one input can shift more than one deduction simultaneously. Our Salary Sacrifice Calculator is useful for exploring the pension side of this in more depth, including how much your employer might contribute or pass back, and our Student Loan Repayment Calculator breaks down the student loan portion on its own if you want more detail than this all-in-one view provides.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this calculator account for the Marriage Allowance?
No — this calculator works from your individual gross salary and standard Personal Allowance, so if you have transferred or received Marriage Allowance, your actual take-home will differ slightly from this calculator’s figure.
Why does my actual payslip show a slightly different figure?
Real payroll can include additional factors this calculator does not model — a specific tax code adjustment, benefits in kind, or a bonus taxed differently in a specific pay period — any of which can produce a modest difference from this general estimate.
Does this work for Scottish taxpayers?
Yes — selecting the Scottish tax option applies Scotland’s five-band income tax structure instead of the rest-of-UK three-band system, while National Insurance is calculated identically either way, since NI is not devolved.
Does bonus income get taxed differently to salary?
A bonus is generally taxed as ordinary income in the pay period it is received, though a large one-off bonus can temporarily push you into a higher tax band for that specific pay period even if your annual salary alone would not, which can look like an unusually high deduction on that particular payslip.
Should I include employer pension contributions in the pension percentage I enter?
No — this field is specifically for your own employee contribution, since employer contributions do not come out of your gross salary and do not affect your take-home pay calculation at all.
Important Information
This calculator provides an estimate based on standard 2026/27 tax, NI and student loan rates for general information purposes only and does not constitute tax or financial advice. Actual take-home pay depends on your specific tax code, pension scheme type and personal circumstances. See our Disclaimer for further information.