US / UK
Enter your gross salary. See Income Tax (20/40/45%), National Insurance (8%/2%), take-home, monthly, weekly and hourly pay. Everything runs in your browser.
Method: 2026/27 bands, £12,570 Personal Allowance (tapers over £100k), Class 1 employee NI. No pension, no student loan, no Scottish rates. Estimates only.
| Salary | Income Tax | NI | Take-home | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £30,000 | £3,486 | £1,394 | £25,120 | £2,093 |
| £50,000 | £7,486 | £2,994 | £39,520 | £3,293 |
| £80,000 | £19,432 | £3,611 | £56,957 | £4,746 |
| £100,000 | £27,432 | £4,011 | £68,557 | £5,713 |
A calculator works from assumptions; a payslip works from your actual tax code. Three checks close the gap. First, compare the tax code: 1257L means the standard allowance with no adjustments, and any other code — a company car, medical insurance, untaxed interest or an earlier underpayment — changes the allowance this page assumes. Second, look at the National Insurance letter: A is the standard category for most employees, while other letters mean a different rate applies.
Third, compare like with like. The calculator shows a full tax year, so a monthly payslip only matches it if the salary has been the same all year and the tax code has not changed. If your pay varies, or you joined part-way through the year, add up the year-to-date figures and compare those instead. Pension lines are the last piece: a contribution taken before tax lowers taxable pay, which is why a colleague on the same salary can take home a different amount.
Your salary is not the whole cost of employing you. Employers pay Class 1 secondary National Insurance at 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £5,000 a year — roughly £6,000 on top of a £45,000 salary, before any pension. Under auto-enrolment an employer must also contribute at least 3% of qualifying earnings into a workplace pension, and larger employers pay the apprenticeship levy as well.
None of it appears on your payslip, but it explains two things that puzzle people: why take-home pay sits so far below gross pay, and why employers sometimes prefer to pay into a pension or run a salary-sacrifice scheme instead of giving an equivalent cash rise — the employer National Insurance saving can be shared with you.
This calculator is deliberately narrow so that every figure can be checked: income tax and Class 1 National Insurance for a standard tax code in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, with no pension sacrifice, no student loan, no benefits in kind and no adjustments carried over from earlier years. Scottish income tax bands differ, and Welsh rates are set separately by the Welsh Government.
Child benefit, universal credit, the marriage allowance, Gift Aid and tax-free childcare all change the outcome. Treat the result as a planning starting point that is accurate for the assumptions listed — and those assumptions are printed next to the number.
About £39,520 a year in 2026/27 — roughly £3,293 a month or £760 a week.
£12,570 tax-free in 2026/27, tapering above £100,000 of income.
No — England, Wales and Northern Ireland bands. Scotland has its own starter, basic, intermediate, higher, advanced and top rates.
Bands, allowances and sources: UK methodology → • US version: aftertaxlab.com
The biggest gap between the calculator and your payslip is usually pension salary sacrifice. Under auto-enrolment, an employee contributes at least 5% of qualifying earnings and the employer at least 3%, and the employee share is taken from gross pay before income tax and National Insurance. Sacrificing more reduces your take-home today but increases your retirement pot, and because the contribution avoids both income tax and NI, it is cheaper than saving the same amount after tax.
Student loan repayments are collected like a tax once your income crosses the plan threshold — 9% of everything above it for Plans 1, 2, 4 and 5. They do not appear in the headline tax figures here, so if you have a loan, subtract roughly 9% of the amount above your plan threshold before comparing offers.
Finally, remember that Scotland has different bands from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. If you live in Scotland, use the Scottish bands rather than the ones shown, because the difference becomes material above £43,000.
National Insurance is charged per pay period rather than cumulatively across the year, which is why two people on the same annual salary can see different totals if one is paid weekly and the other monthly. The threshold is applied to each pay packet, so weekly payers cross it more times and, at the margin, contribute slightly more over the year.
The other trap is the effective 60% band between £100,000 and roughly £125,140. In that range the Personal Allowance is withdrawn by £1 for every £2 earned, so each extra pound is taxed at 40% and simultaneously removes allowance — an effective rate near 60%. If you are near that line, pension contributions are the standard way to bring taxable income back below it.
Figures on this page are planning estimates built from published IRS tables and state agency rates; they are not tax advice. How we build and check these estimates · Edited by: Nuh Taspinar · Last updated: 2026-11-09
AfterTaxLab