UK Salary Calculator 2026/27

How this UK salary calculator works

Enter your annual gross salary, pick your region, and we show your take-home pay after Income Tax and National Insurance — for the 2026/27 tax year by default, with 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 also available. Results update as you type; every figure is pulled from gov.uk and gov.scot publications and unit-tested against HMRC worked examples.

The calculator works for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and can accept salary as a yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly figure — useful if you’re quoted a day rate and want the annualised take-home.

What the 2026/27 calculation includes

The default view assumes a standard employee on the 1257L tax code with no special allowances. Every result line accounts for:

• Income Tax at the correct bands for your region, with the Personal Allowance taper (£1 lost for every £2 of income above £100,000, fully gone at £125,140).
• Employee National Insurance (Class 1) — 8% on earnings between £12,570 and £50,270, 2% above. NI thresholds remained frozen for 2026/27.
• Optional salary-sacrifice pension contribution — reduces both Income Tax and NI, the most tax-efficient way to save for retirement.
• Optional student loan repayments — Plan 1, Plan 2, Plan 4 (Scotland), Plan 5 (new post-Aug-2023), and the Postgraduate Loan all calculated independently at the correct thresholds and 9% / 6% rates.
• Optional Marriage Allowance, Blind Person’s Allowance, and state pension-age adjustment — toggle any of these to see the immediate impact.

2026/27 tax bands at a glance

For England, Wales and Northern Ireland:

Scotland uses its own six-band structure — Starter (19%), Basic (20%), Intermediate (21%), Higher (42%), Advanced (45%) and Top (48%) — with the Higher Rate threshold at £43,663 and the Top rate kicking in above £125,140. Switch the Region toggle to Scotland to see the Scottish calculation applied to your gross.

Yearly, monthly, weekly, daily or hourly

The input next to the £ sign lets you enter the amount per year, month, week, day or hour. We convert it to an annual equivalent using standardised divisors (52 weeks, 12 months, 260 working days, 52 × 37.5 hours) and run the full PAYE calculation on the annualised figure. That means the calculator doubles as a monthly-pay calculator, a day-rate take-home calculator, and an hourly-rate converter.

For dedicated day-rate or hourly-rate breakdowns with minimum-wage checks and time-in-band analysis, use the Hourly Calculator or the Contractor Day Rate Calculator.

Worked example — £45,000 in 2026/27 (England)

Enter 45000 and you’ll see:

• Personal Allowance used: £12,570
• Basic-rate tax on £32,430: £6,486
• Employee NI on £32,430: £2,594
• Take-home: ~£35,920 / year (~£2,993 / month)
• Effective tax + NI rate: ~20.2%

Add a 5% salary-sacrifice pension and the contribution (£2,250) is deducted before both tax and NI — saving roughly £720 in combined tax/NI while still putting £2,250 into your pension pot. That’s the single biggest tax-efficiency lever for most PAYE workers.

England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland

Wales currently matches UK-wide rates through the Welsh Rate of Income Tax (WRIT), so take-home for a Welsh taxpayer is identical to an English one at the same salary. We model Wales as a separate region internally so that any future WRIT divergence will be reflected automatically.

Scottish taxpayers pay materially more than rUK at most salaries above £28,000 — the Higher-rate threshold is lower and the top rates are higher. See our Scottish Income Tax guide for the step-by-step on why, and the exact cut-offs for 2026/27.

How the 2026/27 numbers compare to 2025/26

All thresholds remain frozen for 2026/27 (the freeze is now in its fifth year), so nominal take-home pay is largely flat year-on-year — but inflation means the real-terms purchasing power is falling. At £35k gross, take-home in 2026/27 is within £5 of 2025/26 in England; in Scotland the divergence grows because of the Scottish Budget’s 2024 adjustments to the Advanced and Top bands.

What we don’t yet cover

• Non-resident tax status
• Directors’ NI (cumulative method)
• Complex share-scheme taxation (EMI, CSOP, SAYE)
• Benefits-in-kind beyond a simple P11D value

For anything in this list our Methodology page explains exactly how we’d handle it — we prefer to flag the gap than produce a wrong number.

Related reading

• Understanding UK Tax Codes — what 1257L, K475, and BR actually mean and when to worry.
• Scottish Income Tax Explained — the six bands, the Higher-rate threshold gap, and worked examples.
• Student Loan Plans Explained — which plan you’re on and how repayment stacks on top of tax.
• IR35 Explained — for contractors comparing inside-IR35 PAYE to outside-IR35 LTD take-home.
• Pension Auto-Enrolment — the single biggest take-home lever most employees miss.
• UK Tax Year Changes 2026/27 — every threshold, rate, and uprate that shifted between 2025/26 and 2026/27.
• PAYE Explained — how the cumulative code on your payslip turns one annual salary into the right monthly tax.
• Emergency Tax — What to Do — why a first paycheck at a new job usually over-taxes you and how to fix it.

See our methodology for the full list of sources and testing approach.