United Kingdom · 2026/27
What the job costs, and what you keep
Every salary calculator gives you one number. It is the least useful one you could be given, because it says nothing about what your next £100 is taxed at — and that is the number every decision turns on.
Your result
Example · £45,000 in England & Wales. Change the figure above to make it yours.
- Take-home a year
- £35,919.60
- £2,993.30 a month · £690.76 a week
- Total deductions
- £9,080.40
- 20.2% of gross pay
- On your next £100
- 28%
- You keep £72 of the next £100
- Cost to employ you
- £51,000
- Includes £6,000 of employer NI absent from your payslip
- The wedge
- 29.6%
- Share of that cost that never reaches you
Student loans, salary sacrifice and the full breakdown →
There is no 62% income tax band in UK law. There is one in your payslip.
Between £100,000 and £125,140 the personal allowance is withdrawn at £1 for every £2 earned, so each extra pound is taxed at 40% and drags a previously tax-free pound into tax. Add National Insurance and the rate on the next £100 is 62%. Add a Plan 2 student loan and it is 71%. Nobody legislated those numbers and no rate table shows them, which is why most people meet them by accident — usually the month a promotion lands.
This site computes the whole curve, for every income, from the published HMRC and Scottish Government rates. It also counts the part your payslip never shows: employer National Insurance, 15% on everything above £5,000, which is money spent to employ you that you never see. Counting it is what makes the difference between a tax rate and a wedge.
Start here
- Tool Take-home pay calculator Any salary or hourly rate, either UK tax regime, student loans and salary sacrifice. Shows the marginal rate, not just the total.
- The data Marginal rates in full Every band you actually live in, discovered by computing the tax at every £100 step — not copied from a rate table. 62%
- Tables Take-home by salary What every salary from £15,000 to £200,000 leaves you, with the full band breakdown on each.
- Tables Hourly rate to salary What an hourly rate is worth a year, a month and a week — at 37.5 and 40 hours.
- Guide The £100,000 trap Why the worst marginal rate in the country is in the middle of the scale, and what to do about it.
- Guide What a tax wedge is The gap between what your employer spends and what reaches your account — and why your payslip hides half of it.
The same £45,000, in two places
Income tax is devolved to Scotland; National Insurance is not. So an identical salary produces a different answer either side of the border — and the gap is not a constant percentage, it changes band by band.
| England & Wales | Scotland | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income tax | £6,486 | £6,882.05 | +£396.05 |
| National Insurance | £2,594.40 | £2,594.40 | same |
| Take-home | £35,919.60 | £35,523.55 | −£396.05 |
| Rate on your next £100 | 28% | 50% | 22 points |
The take-home gap is modest. The marginal gap is not — and the marginal one is what decides whether the next rise is worth taking.
Why the next hundred pounds is the number that matters
A take-home figure tells you what you have. It cannot tell you what to do, and almost every question people bring to a salary calculator is a decision rather than a description: whether the rise is worth the extra responsibility, what the bonus will actually land as, whether to put the money in the pension instead, what the promotion past £100,000 really pays once the allowance starts disappearing.
Those questions are all priced at the margin, and in the UK the marginal rate is routinely twenty points away from the effective rate on the same payslip. Someone on £45,000 pays about a fifth of their gross in tax and National Insurance, and 28% on anything extra. Someone at £110,000 is paying around a third overall and 62% on the next pound. Neither gap is visible on a payslip, and neither appears in the published rate tables — because the rate tables describe the pieces and the payslip describes the total, and the useful number is the interaction between them.
The rates nobody legislated
Two stretches of the UK system produce marginal rates higher than any rate in the statutory table, and neither was ever voted on as such. Above £100,000 the personal allowance is withdrawn at £1 for every £2 earned, so the same pound is taxed twice and the marginal rate becomes 60% — over 70% with a student loan repaying on top. Between £60,000 and £80,000 a parent claiming Child Benefit pays it back at 1% for every £200 of income, which is a real rate stacked on tax and National Insurance and appears in no table anywhere.
Scotland's version is different and less well known. Its six income tax bands and the UK-wide National Insurance thresholds cross each other rather than lining up, which opens a window around £43,663 where the rate on further pay is higher than it is twenty thousand pounds further up the scale. That is an emergent property of two independent sets of thresholds, and the only way to see it is to compute the whole curve. The marginal rate pages do exactly that, for both regimes.
What this site does differently
Three things. It shows the rate on your next £100 beside the take-home figure, on every page, because that is the number decisions turn on. It shows the employer's National Insurance — money spent to employ you that appears on no payslip in the country — because leaving it out makes the burden on a job look about a third smaller than it is. And it shows the arithmetic band by band rather than asserting a total, because a total you cannot check against your payslip is a total you have to take on faith.
Everything is computed from the published rates for the current tax year, listed with their sources and the date each was read, and nothing you type is sent anywhere — the calculation runs in your browser.
How this is built
Every figure on this site comes from one function, run over parameters read off GOV.UK and recorded with the date they were read. The same function runs in your browser when you move the calculator, so the page and the tool cannot disagree — the build asserts they are the same file.
The marginal bands are not typed in. They are found by computing the tax at every £100 from zero to £180,000 and recording where the answer changes, which means they stay correct when a threshold moves and cannot quietly go stale. The method in full →