Free tool
Take home pay calculator (UK)
Put in your annual gross salary and this UK salary calculator shows what actually lands in your bank account, after income tax, employee National Insurance and your pension contribution. You get the yearly, monthly and weekly figures, and the working written out in words so you can check every line yourself. No sign up needed for the calculator.
Student loan (optional, and you supply the figures)
Student loan plans are not built into this tool. The plan thresholds and rates are not in the rate set I built it from, and I am not going to guess yours. Look your plan up on gov.uk, then type its annual threshold and its repayment percentage in below. Leave both blank for no student loan.
| Gross salary | £0.00 |
| Pension contribution (salary sacrifice) | £0.00 |
| Pay after pension, used for tax and NI | £0.00 |
| Personal allowance | £0.00 |
| Taxable income | £0.00 |
| Income tax | £0.00 |
| at the 20% basic rate | £0.00 |
| at the 40% higher rate | £0.00 |
| at the 45% additional rate | £0.00 |
| Employee National Insurance | £0.00 |
| Student loan repayment | £0.00 |
| Take home pay for the year | £0.00 |
Enter a salary to see the working.
Rest of UK income tax rates for the 2026/27 tax year, which means England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scottish income tax has different bands and rates and is not used here. One salary, one job, a full tax year, standard tax code, no benefits in kind. Rates last checked: 15 July 2026.
Quick answer
On a £30,000 salary in 2026/27, with no pension contribution, you pay £3,486 income tax and £1,394.40 employee National Insurance, so take home pay is £25,119.60 a year, £2,093.30 a month or £483.07 a week. The sums: personal allowance £12,570, then 20% income tax on the next £37,700 of taxable income, 40% up to £125,140 and 45% above that, with employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above £50,270. These are rest of UK rates. Scotland has different income tax rates.
Get the take home pay calculator spreadsheet
The same maths in Excel, so you can model pay rises, pension changes and a whole team at once. It has a single salary calculator tab with every step shown, a team tab that does up to twelve people with a department breakdown, and a rates tab where you change a rate once and every figure updates. Enter your details and the Excel file downloads immediately.
No newsletter spam. The form sends me your name, email and the exact resource requested so I can follow up properly.
Your spreadsheet is ready
Your request has been sent to me with the resource name, so I can follow up with the right notes.
How this UK salary calculator works
- Pension first: the contribution is treated as salary sacrifice, so it comes off your gross pay before anything else. A 5% contribution on £50,000 leaves £47,500 as the pay that tax and National Insurance are worked out on.
- Then the personal allowance: £12,570 of that pay is tax free. Everything above it is taxable income.
- Then income tax in bands: 20% on the first £37,700 of taxable income, 40% on taxable income from £37,700 up to £125,140, and 45% on anything above £125,140.
- Then employee National Insurance: 8% of pay between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% on everything above £50,270. National Insurance is charged on pay, not on taxable income, so the personal allowance does not change it.
- Then anything you added: student loan repayments if you typed in a threshold and a rate.
- What is left is take home pay: divided by 12 for a monthly figure and by 52 for a weekly one.
Rates last checked: 15 July 2026. Tax year 2026/27, rest of UK rates: personal allowance £12,570 tapering above £100,000, basic rate 20% to £50,270, higher rate 40% to £125,140, additional rate 45%, employee National Insurance 8% and 2%.
Is a payroll calculator the same as a salary calculator?
They overlap but they are not the same thing, and the difference matters if you are the one running the payroll. A salary calculator like this one answers the employee question: on this salary, what do I take home? A full payroll calculator also works out what the job costs the employer, which means employer National Insurance at 15% on pay above the £5,000 secondary threshold, the employer pension contribution, and the employment allowance if the business qualifies for it. This tool is deliberately the employee side only. If you want the employer cost view as well, tell me and I will build it, because that is the sort of thing I do for clients anyway.
What a salary sacrifice pension does to your take home pay
A salary sacrifice pension reduces your take home pay, but by less than the amount you put in, because the contribution never counts as pay for income tax or National Insurance. On a £50,000 salary a 5% contribution is £2,500 into the pension, but take home only falls by about £1,700, because you would have paid 20% tax and 8% National Insurance on that money anyway. That is the whole point of it. Change the pension percentage above and watch both numbers move: the take home figure falls, but it falls more slowly than the contribution rises.
One thing to watch: salary sacrifice reduces the salary figure that some other things are based on, including statutory maternity pay, mortgage affordability assessments and any death in service cover set as a multiple of salary. Check before you push your contribution up hard.
How to turn an annual salary into monthly and weekly pay
Take home pay for the year divided by 12 gives the monthly figure, which is what most UK employers actually pay. Divided by 52 gives a weekly figure, which is useful for budgeting or for comparing against an hourly rate. The two do not tie back to each other neatly, because there are not exactly four weeks in a month, so do not try to multiply the weekly figure by four and expect the monthly one. If you are paid weekly you will get 52 payments most years and 53 in some, which is why a weekly paid year can end up looking slightly different from the annual figure on paper. This calculator shows both so you can budget against whichever one matches your payslip.
How much take home pay do you get on a £30,000 salary?
£25,119.60 a year, or £2,093.30 a month, with no pension contribution and no student loan. Income tax is £3,486 and employee National Insurance is £1,394.40. Both come out of the £17,430 of pay above the £12,570 personal allowance: 20% of it in tax, 8% of it in National Insurance.
How is income tax worked out on a UK salary?
Your personal allowance of £12,570 comes off first, and what is left is taxable income. The first £37,700 of that is taxed at 20%, the slice from £37,700 to £125,140 at 40%, and anything above £125,140 at 45%. On a full personal allowance that means the 40% rate starts once your salary passes £50,270. These are the rest of UK rates for 2026/27.
How much National Insurance do employees pay?
Employee National Insurance is 8% of earnings between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% on everything above £50,270. The maximum you can pay in the 8% band is £3,016 a year. National Insurance is charged on your pay, not on taxable income, so it is not affected by your tax code, and unlike income tax the rate goes down rather than up once you pass the upper limit.
Why does take home pay fall so fast over £100,000?
Because the personal allowance is cut by £1 for every £2 of pay above £100,000, and it is gone completely at £125,140. Losing allowance means more of your income is taxed at 40%, so between £100,000 and £125,140 each extra pound is effectively taxed at 60%, plus 2% National Insurance. Increasing a pension contribution to bring your pay back under £100,000 is the usual fix, and you can test that here by raising the pension percentage.
Does this salary calculator work for Scotland?
No. Scottish taxpayers pay Scottish income tax, which has more bands and different rates, and those rates are not in this calculator. National Insurance is the same across the whole UK, so the National Insurance figure here is right wherever you live, but the income tax figure is only right for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. If you pay Scottish income tax, use the tax figure here as a rough floor and check the Scottish bands before relying on it.
Do student loan repayments come out of take home pay?
Yes, they are taken through PAYE alongside tax and National Insurance, and they are a percentage of earnings above a threshold rather than a fixed amount. The thresholds and percentages differ by plan and change most years, so they are not built into this calculator. Look your plan up on gov.uk, type its annual threshold and its percentage into the optional fields above, and the figure will be included. HMRC rounds each period's deduction down to whole pounds, so a real payslip will be a pound or two under the annual figure shown here.
Related tools
Digital Adaption helps UK businesses fix the data behind the numbers: bookkeeping workflows, reporting you can trust and systems that talk to each other. Get in touch. Need a version of this tool built for your own company, with your rates, categories and workflows baked in? We build custom calculators, workbooks and internal tools. Contact us for a tailored quote.