Sources

Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-and-thresholds-for-employers-2026-to-2027
HM Revenue & Customs · read 29 August 2026

Supplies:

• National Insurance primary threshold £12,570/yr
• National Insurance upper earnings limit £50,270/yr
• Employee Class 1 category A rates 0% / 8% / 2%
• Employer secondary threshold £5,000/yr
• Employer category A rate 15% with no upper limit
• Student loan plan thresholds and the 9% / 6% deduction rates

Income Tax rates and Personal Allowances

https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
GOV.UK · read 29 August 2026

Supplies:

• Personal Allowance £12,570
• Personal Allowance taper: £1 lost per £2 of income above £100,000, nil at £125,140
• Basic 20% £12,571–£50,270, higher 40% £50,271–£125,140, additional 45% above £125,140

Income Tax in Scotland: 2026 to 2027 tax year

https://www.gov.uk/scottish-income-tax/2026-to-2027-tax-year
GOV.UK · read 29 August 2026

Supplies:

• Starter 19% £12,571–£16,537
• Basic 20% £16,538–£29,526
• Intermediate 21% £29,527–£43,662
• Higher 42% £43,663–£75,000
• Advanced 45% £75,001–£125,140
• Top 48% above £125,140

Self-employed National Insurance rates

https://www.gov.uk/self-employed-national-insurance-rates
GOV.UK · read 29 August 2026

Supplies:

• Class 4: 6% on profits over £12,570 up to £50,270
• Class 4: 2% on profits over £50,270
• Class 2 treated as paid where profits are £7,105 or more, so nothing is due
• Voluntary Class 2 rate £3.65 a week below the £7,105 small profits threshold

Why primary sources only

Rate summaries on the open web disagree with each other more often than they should, and a summary that is wrong looks exactly like one that is right. Each figure above was taken from the publishing department's own page. Where a search result and the government page disagreed during construction, the government page won and the search result was discarded.

How often these change

UK income tax and National Insurance rates run with the tax year, which starts on 6 April. They are normally announced at the preceding autumn Budget, so the figures for a year are usually knowable months before they apply. Scottish rates are set separately by the Scottish Government and announced at the Scottish Budget, typically in December — which is why Scotland's bands can move in a year when the rest of the UK's do not, and why the two are held as separate parameter sets here rather than as one with overrides.

The personal allowance and the higher-rate threshold are currently frozen rather than indexed, which is a policy choice with a compounding effect: as pay rises, more income crosses fixed thresholds, so the effective rate on an unchanged real salary climbs each year without any rate changing. The £100,000 taper threshold has never been indexed at all since it was introduced, so the band it creates catches more people every year.

How to check a figure yourself

Every page shows its working — band by band, with the amount each rate was applied to — precisely so that a figure can be checked rather than trusted. If you want to verify against a third party, HMRC's own income tax estimator is the right comparison for income tax and National Insurance. It will not show employer National Insurance, the marginal rate, or the wedge, because it is not trying to.

If a figure here disagrees with your payslip, the most likely explanations in order are: a tax code that is not the standard one, a benefit in kind, a workplace pension deducted before tax, or National Insurance charged on a pay period containing a bonus. If none of those fits, it may be an error here, and it is worth an email — corrections are published on /changes/.

Reuse

The computed tables — the marginal band lists in particular — are published under CC BY 4.0. Attribution to TaxWedge with a link is enough. The underlying rates are Crown copyright and available under the Open Government Licence.

How to read this list

Every number the engine uses is in the table above, and every row names the government page it came from and the date that page was read. That second field is the one that does the work. A tax rate with no retrieval date is an assertion; a tax rate with one is a claim that can be checked against what the source said on a particular day, and disproved if it is wrong.

Nothing on this site is transcribed from a summary, a news article, or another calculator. Where a figure appears in more than one government publication — the personal allowance is in the Budget documents, in the HMRC rates and thresholds page, and in the legislation itself — the operational HMRC page is preferred, because that is the one payroll software is written against.

What counts as a source, and what does not

A source here is a page published by HMRC, by GOV.UK, by the Scottish Government or by the Student Loans Company that states a parameter directly. Explanatory guidance is used to decide how a rule applies — whether a threshold is tested on gross pay or on adjusted net income, for instance — but the numbers themselves always come from a rates page.

Deliberately not used: other calculators, aggregator sites, forum threads, and press coverage of Budgets. Those are often right, and being right is not the same as being checkable. If every site copies its thresholds from every other site, an error propagates silently and there is no way to find the original. Reading the government page is slower and it is the only method that fails loudly.

Devolution, and why there are two sets of bands

Income tax rates and bands on non-savings, non-dividend income are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, which sets six bands where the rest of the UK has three. The personal allowance is not devolved and is the same everywhere. National Insurance is not devolved either, so it is identical across the UK — which is why the difference between a Scottish page and an English one is entirely income tax, and why the two sets of thresholds cross rather than running parallel. Student loan thresholds are UK-wide and depend on which plan you are on rather than where you live, with the exception of Plan 4, which is the Scottish plan and is available wherever you now work.

Wales has the power to vary income tax rates and has so far set them at the same level as England and Northern Ireland, so the three are treated as one jurisdiction here. If that ever changes, it becomes a third set of bands and a logged scope change.

When the rates change

Parameters are reviewed at the start of each tax year on 6 April and whenever a Budget or a Scottish Budget announces a change. Because every page is generated from the same data file, a parameter change regenerates the whole site rather than being patched into individual pages — there is no mechanism by which one page could be left on last year's figure. The change is recorded on /changes/ with the old value and the new one.

If you are reading a page whose stated tax year is not the current one, the figures are correct for that year and wrong for this one. The tax year is stated on every page for exactly that reason.

If a source has moved

Government pages are reorganised and URLs change. If a link here is dead, the retrieval date still identifies what was read and when, and the National Archives keeps snapshots of GOV.UK that make the original recoverable. A dead link is a defect worth reporting to corrections@taxwedge.com.

Why the retrieval date is part of the citation

A tax rate quoted without a date is not checkable, because the page it came from may since have changed. Recording the day each parameter was read turns every row above into a falsifiable claim rather than an assertion, and it is the reason a reader can audit this site without trusting it.