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 6 different values in Scotland — 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 69.5%, 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.
• £16,538 — basic rate.
• £29,527 — intermediate rate.
• £43,663 — higher rate.
• £50,270 — National Insurance upper earnings limit.
• £75,001 — advanced rate.
• £100,000 — personal allowance taper.
• £125,140 — end of the taper.
• £125,141 — top 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.

£48,750 sits between two things that matter. £5,087 below you is the higher rate, and £1,520 above you is the National Insurance upper earnings limit — so this salary is already past one change and approaching another.

• £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.
• £43,663 — Crossing it does not re-tax what you already earn — only the pounds above it move to the higher rate, which is the single most misunderstood thing about Scottish income tax.
• £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.

£48,750 is £5,087 above the higher rate, and that is the number a pension contribution is measured against here. Sacrificing exactly £5,087 takes your taxable pay back to £43,663, costs £2,543.50 in take-home, and puts £5,087 into your pension — 2.00 pounds saved for every pound of spending power given up. A ratio above two to one is unusual and it is created by the threshold, not by the pension: it is worth knowing before deciding anything else about a rise or a bonus at this salary. Employer National Insurance of 15% is saved on the sacrificed amount too, which some employers add to the pot and some keep.

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.