Hourly rate to annual salary

Every rate

The shape of the whole ladder

There are 59 rates on this page, from £10 to £100 an hour, and they do not sit in one tax band. Between the lowest and the highest, the rate on the next £100 of pay takes 4 different values in England, Wales & Northern Ireland — which is the reason this is a list of pages rather than one page with a box on it. A single answer would be right at one end of the ladder and wrong at the other.

The steepest point on this list is 62%, and 9 of the 59 rates here sit at it. That is not the top of the tax table; it is where the bands and the withdrawals overlap, and it is the number this site exists to make visible.

The thresholds that create those groups are fixed amounts, and knowing them is most of what makes a payslip predictable:

• £12,570 — personal allowance.
• £50,270 — National Insurance upper earnings limit.
• £50,271 — higher rate.
• £100,000 — personal allowance taper.
• £125,140 — end of the taper.
• £125,141 — additional rate.

Every page below shows the same things for one figure: the take-home, the band-by-band arithmetic, the rate on the next £100, what the job costs an employer, and what a pension contribution or a student loan does to all of it. They are generated from the published 2026/27 parameters rather than typed, which is why the thresholds the engine discovers reproduce the statutory ones exactly — that check is what the method page is about.

One rate, worked all the way through

The table below gives the headline for every rate. This is what one of those rows looks like opened up, on a 37.5-hour week — the thresholds around the annual equivalent, and what a pension contribution from there would buy. Every page in the list does the same for its own rate.

Everything that changes near £48,750 is above it. The nearest is the National Insurance upper earnings limit, at £50,270 — £1,520 away, which is 3.1% of this salary.

• £50,270 — Above it your own National Insurance falls from 8% to 2%. That is £1,520 away, and it is the reason the higher rate stings less at the margin than the headline jump suggests.
• £50,271 — £1,521 of headroom is roughly one ordinary pay rise. Worth knowing before negotiating one, because the part above this line is worth less in your hand than the part below it.
• £60,000 — £11,250 above this, a parent claiming Child Benefit begins paying it back at 1% for every £200 of income — a real marginal rate stacked on tax and National Insurance.

There is no threshold within reach below £48,750, so a pension contribution here is not about ducking under anything — it is simply the ordinary trade. Sacrificing £2,500 costs you £1,800 in take-home, because 28% of it was never going to reach you anyway, and puts the full £2,500 into the pot. That is £2,500 of saving for £1,800 of spending power — a ratio of 1.39 to one, and it is the same ratio for every pound until the next band.

Every one of the five repayment thresholds is behind this salary, so whichever plan you are on, you are repaying. Which plan you are on is not a choice, and the difference between them at this salary is £319.05 a year, so it is worth knowing which one your payslip is deducting.