UK salary after tax

Ruleset sha256:7c8a1de9fc6d87cc. Which salaries get a page is decided by measured search demand, recorded with its own provenance in data/pages/gb-after-tax.json; it has no effect on any figure above. Every number here is computed from HMRC rates in the rule store.

For a salary that is not listed, or to change the assumptions, use the United Kingdom calculator.

How to read this table

The effective rate column is what you actually pay across the whole salary. It rises smoothly because each band applies only to the income inside it, so crossing into a higher band never taxes the income below it at the new rate. The next-£100 column is the marginal rate, and it moves in steps: it is the number that decides whether a rise, a bonus or a second job is worth taking, and it is measured by computing the tax twice rather than by reading a band off a table.

Between £100,000 and £125,140 the marginal column reads 62% while the published higher rate is 40%. That is the personal allowance being withdrawn at fifty pence in the pound as income rises, which taxes each extra pound twice: once itself, and once by exposing allowance that used to be tax free. It is not a published rate and it appears in no rate table, because it is the interaction of two rules that are each published separately. Rows in that region are marked.

Every row assumes a single person on employment income in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, on National Insurance category A, with no pension contribution, student loan repayment, salary sacrifice or marriage allowance. Scotland sets its own bands and is not applied here. Those assumptions are stated on every page rather than buried, because each one changes the answer and a calculator that silently picked one for you would be giving you somebody else's number.

The salaries listed are the ones with measured search demand, from a keyword export pulled in September 2026 and filtered to whole thousands at or above £10,000. That list decides which pages exist and nothing else: every figure in the table is computed by the engine from HMRC rates, so a salary being in or out of the list cannot change a number shown for any other.

The thresholds every one of these salaries is measured against

Six points on the income scale change what the next pound costs. Income tax starts once the personal allowance is used up. National Insurance starts a few pounds higher, because HMRC publishes its thresholds weekly and this site annualises them at fifty-two weeks rather than pretending the annual figure is the same number. The higher rate begins where the basic band ends, measured on taxable income and therefore lifted by whatever allowance you still have.

Above the upper earnings limit, National Insurance falls rather than rises, which means the marginal rate can drop as income increases even though income tax never does. Then the personal allowance taper begins at £100,000, and it does not end until the allowance is gone, which happens at exactly the salary the additional rate starts. That coincidence is not luck: the taper is written to finish there.

Each salary page lists these thresholds with the ones already passed marked, the distance to the next one, and what changes when you reach it. A reader deciding whether to push for £52,000 rather than £49,000 can see that the answer is not the difference in gross.

What the shape of this table tells you

Read down the effective rate column and the progressivity of the UK system is visible in a way no summary of band rates conveys. At the bottom of the table the rate is zero, because the whole salary sits inside the personal allowance. It climbs slowly through the twenties as the basic rate band fills, accelerates once the higher rate starts, flattens briefly, then climbs again through the allowance taper before settling as the additional rate takes over. Nobody in the table pays anything close to the top band rate as an effective rate, and at the very top of it the effective rate is still well under the 45% headline.

The marginal column is the one that behaves oddly, and the oddity is real rather than an artefact. It steps from zero to 28%, which is the basic rate plus employee National Insurance, not the 20% people quote. It steps again to 42% at the higher rate. It reaches 62% in the taper region. Then it falls to 47%. A tax system in which the marginal rate falls as income rises is unusual and it is a direct consequence of two rules interacting: the allowance withdrawal ending, and National Insurance dropping above the upper earnings limit.

This matters for anyone negotiating. Between £100,000 and £125,140 an extra £1,000 of salary is worth less than £400 after tax, and a pension contribution or salary sacrifice in that range is worth considerably more than the same amount of gross pay. Between £50,270 and £100,000 the same £1,000 is worth £580. The difference is not a rate on a table; it is what the table means once both schedules are applied to the same salary.

The 272 salaries listed run from £10,000 to £990,000. They are not evenly spaced, because they were not chosen to be: they are the amounts people actually search for, which clusters tightly in whole thousands between £20,000 and £80,000 and then thins out into round figures. That distribution is itself a fact about what readers want, and matching it is why the list looks the way it does rather than being a neat arithmetic sequence.

Questions about UK take-home pay

Why 272 pages rather than one calculator

A calculator answers the question you typed. A page about your salary answers the questions you were about to type: which band you are in, how far the next threshold is, what a rise is actually worth, what the same position looks like in another country. Those are different answers for £30,000 and £130,000, and a single interactive box cannot be the page for either.

There is also an honesty argument. A page built for one salary can state the thresholds that salary passes and the ones it has not reached, and can say plainly that a reader at £110,000 faces 62% on the next pound while a reader at £40,000 faces 28%. A calculator that shows a single figure and a band table leaves the reader to work that out, and most of them never do, which is why the allowance taper remains the least understood feature of the UK system despite affecting everyone who crosses it.

Every one of the 272 pages is computed by the same engine from the same rules as this table, so no page can disagree with another. A gate checks exactly that on every build: for each salary it recomputes the figures and requires the rendered page to contain them, and it fails if a page in the taper region does not mention the 60% band or if a page outside it claims to be inside.

Where the salary list itself came from

The 272 amounts were derived from a keyword export in the United Kingdom database, seeded on the pattern itself rather than on a calculator term. That distinction turned out to matter: seeded on a calculator phrase, the whole amount pattern appeared as a small tail worth a few thousand searches a month, and seeded on an amount it is the head. Keywords were kept where they named an amount and resolved to a whole thousand of at least ten thousand pounds, which drops years and monthly figures that otherwise pollute the list. An earlier version of the list also required a difficulty score at or below twenty-nine, and that filter was removed: it is the right instrument for choosing a market and the wrong one for choosing pages inside a pattern already chosen, and it was cutting the head off this one. The difficulty scores are still recorded per amount, because an amount with no scored keyword is unmeasured rather than easy and that distinction should survive into the data.

That file decides which pages exist and has no other effect. It is not read by the engine, it cannot reach a figure, and adding or removing an amount changes nothing on any other page. The provenance, including the caveats about the export cap and the proportion of rows carrying a difficulty score, is stored beside the data rather than described here.

How this figure is produced, and how it is checked

Nothing on this page is typed in. Every rate, threshold and allowance is a rule in a store, and each rule carries the document it came from, the date it was read, an exact quote and a hash of that quote as it stood on the day. The calculation reads rules through a lens that records every one it touches, so the citations underneath a number are derived from the arithmetic that produced it. A page cannot cite a source the calculation did not use, and cannot use one it does not show.

A missing rule is a build failure rather than a fallback. That sounds severe until you consider the alternative: the failure worth preventing here is not a wrong number, it is a plausible one. A calculator that quietly substitutes last year's allowance produces a figure no reader can tell apart from the right one, and every check that matters is designed around making that impossible rather than unlikely.

Four gates run before anything is published. Golden fixtures check the arithmetic against worked examples at several incomes. An independent second reader compares every rule against a separately published compilation of the same law and records each disagreement rather than resolving it silently. A reconciliation gate computes tax for a single person at 67%, 100% and 167% of the average wage and requires the result to reproduce the average rates the OECD publishes for exactly that person. And a page gate checks that what is rendered matches what was computed, because a template can drift from the engine behind it without either being wrong on its own.

Ruleset sha256:7c8a1de9fc6d87cc. The full method is on methodology, every source on sources, every change on the changelog, and anything found wrong on corrections.

Terms used on this page

Gross salary

Your pay before any deduction. Every rate on this site is expressed against gross, so a rate of 20% means a fifth of what you are paid rather than a fifth of some smaller base.

Taxable income

What the tax ladder actually runs on: gross, less any allowance, less any contribution that reduces the base. It is usually a smaller number than your salary, which is why a top rate of 45% never means 45% of your pay.

Effective rate

Everything taken, divided by gross. It is always lower than the highest band you reach, because the income below that band is taxed at the lower rates on the way up. This is the number to use when comparing two offers.

Marginal rate

What is taken from the next unit you earn. It decides whether a rise, a bonus or an extra shift is worth taking, and it can be far higher than your effective rate. It is measured here by computing the tax twice and taking the difference, never by reading a band off a table.

Allowance

An amount of income outside the tax ladder. Some jurisdictions publish one; others express the same idea as a first band taxed at zero per cent, which produces the same answer by a different route.

Tax credit

An amount taken off the tax itself rather than off the income. A non-refundable credit can reduce tax to zero but not below it, so it is worth less to somebody who owes little than the headline suggests.

Employee social security

Compulsory contributions taken from your pay and distinct from income tax, usually charged on gross with thresholds of their own. Employer contributions are excluded everywhere on this site, because they never appear in your gross pay and including them would flatter or damn a country depending on where its wedge sits.

Tax year

The period a schedule applies to. It is not the year you file in. The two are routinely conflated by pages that rank well for these terms, which is why every rule here carries its tax year as a first-class field.