Calculator · 2026/27
Hourly rate to salary calculator
An hourly rate is not a salary until you fix the week. The same £20 an hour is £20,800 at half time and £41,600 on a forty-hour week — and because tax is banded, take-home does not scale in step with the hours.
Your result
Worked example: £20 an hour
| Week | Gross a year | Take-home a year | A month | A week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 37.5 hours | £39,000 | £31,599.60 | £2,633.30 | £607.68 |
| 40 hours | £41,600 | £33,471.60 | £2,789.30 | £643.68 |
| 35 hours | £36,400 | £29,727.60 | £2,477.30 | £571.68 |
| 20 hours | £20,800 | £18,495.60 | £1,541.30 | £355.68 |
If you are paid only for the weeks you work — agency, term-time or zero-hours — set the paid weeks to what you actually get rather than 52.
The arithmetic, and where it goes wrong
Two mistakes are common enough to name. The first is assuming 52 paid weeks when you are paid only for weeks worked — term-time and agency contracts often mean 39 or fewer, and the difference is a quarter of the answer. The second is assuming take-home scales with hours. It does not, because the personal allowance is a fixed amount rather than a percentage: half the hours leaves you with more than half the take-home, since a larger share of your pay falls in the tax-free band.
At £20 an hour that is worth seeing. Twenty hours a week returns 88.9% of gross as take-home; forty hours returns 80.5%.
Where £38,025 sits in the system
Every calculator on this site runs on the same thresholds, and the reason a figure surprises people is almost always that it sits near one of them. This is what is closest to the worked example above — the thresholds that decide what the next pound is worth, rather than what the last one was.
Everything that changes near £38,025 is behind it. The most recent was the Plan 4 (Scotland) repayment threshold, at £33,795, which you passed £4,230 ago.
| What changes | At | From here | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan 4 (Scotland) repayment threshold | £33,795 | −£4,230 | passed |
| Plan 2 repayment threshold | £29,385 | −£8,640 | passed |
| Plan 1 repayment threshold | £26,900 | −£11,125 | passed |
Measured against the 2026/27 parameters for England, Wales & Northern Ireland. Distances are on gross pay before any salary sacrifice, because that is the figure every one of these thresholds is tested against.
- £33,795 — Plan 4 (Scotland) takes 9% of the £4,230 above its threshold. It is not a tax, but it leaves the same pay on the same day.
- £29,385 — Plan 2 takes 9% of the £8,640 above its threshold. It is not a tax, but it leaves the same pay on the same day.
- £26,900 — Plan 1 takes 9% of the £11,125 above its threshold. It is not a tax, but it leaves the same pay on the same day.
What a ten per cent move would do
A swing of ten per cent either way from £38,025 does not cross a single band: the rate on further pay stays at 28% across the whole range from £34,223 to £41,828. That makes this an unusually predictable place to be paid, and it means the arithmetic below scales — a rise of any size in that range is worth the same proportion in your hand.
| If pay moved | Gross | Take-home | Change | Next £100 taxed at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| −10% | £34,223 | £28,160.16 | −£2,737.44 | 28% |
| −5% | £36,124 | £29,528.88 | −£1,368.72 | 28% |
| +5% | £39,926 | £32,266.32 | +£1,368.72 | 28% |
| +10% | £41,828 | £33,635.76 | +£2,738.16 | 28% |
And what a pension contribution would buy
There is no threshold within reach below £38,025, so a pension contribution here is not about ducking under anything — it is simply the ordinary trade. Sacrificing £2,000 costs you £1,440 in take-home, because 28% of it was never going to reach you anyway, and puts the full £2,000 into the pot. That is £2,000 of saving for £1,440 of spending power — a ratio of 1.39 to one, and it is the same ratio for every pound until the next band.
Student loans on the same figure
A student loan is not a tax and it is not in any headline rate, but it leaves the same pay packet on the same day — so it belongs in any figure used to make a decision. This is what each plan takes at the worked example above.
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 £640.80 a year, so it is worth knowing which one your payslip is deducting.
| Plan | Starts at | Repaid a year | A month | Your next £100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Postgraduate Loan | £21,000 | £1,021.50 | £85.13 | 34% |
| Plan 5 | £25,000 | £1,172.25 | £97.69 | 37% |
| Plan 1 | £26,900 | £1,001.25 | £83.44 | 37% |
| Plan 2 | £29,385 | £777.60 | £64.80 | 37% |
| Plan 4 (Scotland) | £33,795 | £380.70 | £31.72 | 37% |
A postgraduate loan is repaid alongside an undergraduate one rather than instead of it, so someone with both pays both.
One engine behind all eleven
Every calculator on this site runs the same tax engine, and the engine file your browser downloads is byte-identical to the one that generated these pages — a test asserts it, because two implementations of a tax rule is one too many. So the figures here cannot disagree with the salary tables, the hourly pages or any other calculator: they are the same arithmetic asked a different question. The method page sets out how the bands are discovered rather than typed, and sources lists every parameter with the government page and the date it was read from.
Questions people actually ask
£20 an hour is how much a year?
£39,000 a year gross on a 37.5-hour week for 52 weeks, or £31,599.60 after income tax and National Insurance. On a 40-hour week it is £41,600 gross.
How do I convert my hourly rate to a salary?
Multiply the rate by your weekly hours and by the number of weeks you are actually paid for — usually 52 including holiday, but fewer on term-time or agency contracts. Tax is then worked out on that annual figure.
Is overtime taxed more?
It is taxed at your marginal rate, not a special one. On £39,000 that is 28%, so an extra hour at £20 is worth £14.40. It can feel like more because overtime sits on top of everything else you earned that period.
What this calculation assumes
- 2026/27 rates for England, Wales & Northern Ireland.
- One employment, paid through payroll, taxed on the standard code with no adjustments carried in.
- Employment income only — no dividends, savings interest, rental or self-employment income.
- No taxable benefits in kind, no company car, no unpaid leave.
- National Insurance category A: the standard case for an employee over 21 and under State Pension age.
- Income Tax is annual, but National Insurance is charged per pay period — a large one-off bonus can pay more NI than this annual view shows.
- No student or postgraduate loan repayment.
- No salary sacrifice and no workplace pension contribution.