Editorial Policy

SalaryTax exists to give UK earners a fast, accurate, and auditable view of what lands in their bank account after HMRC takes its share. This page describes how we produce, verify, and maintain every number on the site so that you can decide how much weight to place on what you read here.

Institutional trust, not personal authority

We deliberately do not publish per-article author bios. UK tax is set by Acts of Parliament, secondary legislation, and HMRC guidance — none of which depends on which contributor happened to type up our notes that quarter. The rates the calculators use are cited to the underlying gov.uk or gov.scot source, so readers can verify against the published rule, not against a face.

How we source figures

Every income tax band, National Insurance threshold, student loan plan, dividend rate, and personal allowance comes from one of:

• gov.uk primary publications (Income Tax rates, NI letters, HMRC guidance manuals)
• gov.scot for Scottish Income Tax bands
• gov.wales for the Welsh Rate of Income Tax
• HMRC published worked examples, used as regression tests for the salary, National Insurance, dividend, student loan and Statutory Sick Pay calculators
• Office for National Statistics (ASHE, CPI) for population context data

The provenance index is at /data-sources, with the source URL and retrieval date for each dataset.

How we verify accuracy

• Every calculator is implemented as a pure TypeScript function with no I/O.
• Each calculator has unit tests. The salary, National Insurance, dividend, student loan and Statutory Sick Pay calculators are also tested against HMRC's published worked examples, with the source URL and retrieval date recorded in the test.
• The tests run before every commit and again in continuous integration on every push.
• The Income Tax, National Insurance, student loan and other rates that change each April come from a per-tax-year ruleset under src/data/tax/, each figure cited to the gov.uk or gov.scot page it was checked against.
• Automated checks flag pages that state a superseded rate, or cite a statute section or HMRC manual page that does not exist.

Update cadence

Annual maintenance happens on a fixed calendar:

• January — refresh ONS inflation, median salary, and percentile data from the most recent ONS releases.
• March — prepare the next tax year's ruleset ahead of the 6 April changeover.
• Budget — rate changes announced at a Budget are worked in once the HMRC policy papers and legislation are published, and cited to them.

Out-of-cycle changes happen whenever HMRC publishes corrections, when our own content reviews find an error, or when a reader reports a divergence we can reproduce (see /corrections).

How we use AI tools

AI tools are used to help draft code and prose, including guides and news posts. They are not treated as a source. Tax rates and thresholds are read from the per-year ruleset described above, most figures on pages are computed from it, and content is audited against the cited primary source. Reader-reported errors that we confirm are logged at /corrections; errors found by our own reviews are corrected at source.

Editorial independence

SalaryTax is funded by display advertising (when enabled) and is not paid by any bank, broker, accountant, pension provider, or HMRC-adjacent vendor to publish or omit anything. We do not currently take affiliate commissions. If that ever changes, the relationship will be disclosed on the page where it applies and on this policy.

What this site is not

SalaryTax is an information tool, not a regulated financial-advice service. We are not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority and we do not provide personal recommendations on tax planning, pensions, investments, or estate planning. Speak to a chartered tax adviser (CTA), chartered accountant (ACCA/ICAEW), or a regulated financial planner for advice that takes your circumstances into account.

Contact for corrections

Spotted a divergence from HMRC published figures? Email [email protected] with the calculator URL, the inputs you used, the figure we returned, and the figure you believe is correct (with the HMRC source). We log confirmed reader-reported corrections at /corrections.