How this calculator works
True Take-Home is an independently built and maintained calculator, one person, no company behind it, reachable directly via the contact page. It applies published HMRC rates to figures you type in. Nothing is estimated, interpolated or guessed.
The order of calculation
- 1. Your personal allowance is worked out. Normally £12,570.00, but above £100,000 it falls by £1 for every £2 you earn, reaching zero at £125,140.
- 2. Income tax is charged band by band on what remains, using the bands for where you live. Scotland has six bands; England, Wales and Northern Ireland have three.
- 3. National Insurance is charged separately, on gross pay rather than taxable pay, at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% above that. It is not devolved, so it is the same across the UK.
- 4. Student loan repayments are a flat percentage of everything above your plan's threshold, they are not tax, and they are not affected by your personal allowance.
- 5. Pension contributions are applied according to the arrangement you pick, because the three behave differently (see below).
Why the pension arrangement matters
The same contribution produces three different take-home figures. Salary sacrifice reduces your gross pay before both income tax and National Insurance, so it costs you least. A net pay arrangement comes out before tax but National Insurance is still charged on it. Relief at source comes out after both, and your provider reclaims 20%, if you pay higher rate, the rest is something you have to claim yourself, so it never shows up in your take-home at all.
Where the figures come from
- Tax year 2026/27: applies 2026-04-06 to 2027-04-05, checked against HMRC, gov.uk and gov.scot on 2026-08-28
The primary source is HMRC's rates and thresholds for employers, with Scottish bands from gov.scot.
How the maths is checked
A suite of automated checks runs before anything is published. It verifies that every rate is within plausible bounds, that bands ascend without gaps, that the personal allowance reaches exactly zero at £125,140 and never goes negative, that take-home pay rises monotonically with salary right through the taper window, and that reversing the calculation from net back to gross returns the number it started with.
It also refuses to publish if no rate table covers today's date, so when a tax year ends on 5 April, the build fails loudly rather than quietly serving last year's thresholds.
Most importantly, the engine has to reproduce known figures exactly. Four anchor cases are built into the test suite: £30,000 and £60,000 in England, £120,000 inside the allowance taper, and £50,000 in Scotland, which crosses four Scottish bands. Each is checked to the penny. Structural tests catch malformed data; only anchors catch a well-formed number that happens to be wrong.
What this tool does not do
- It gives no tax advice and takes no account of your personal circumstances.
- It assumes the standard 1257L tax code. If yours differs, because of benefits in kind, underpaid tax from an earlier year, or a second job, your payslip will differ too.
- It does not handle dividends, self-employment, rental income, benefits in kind, bonuses taxed in a single period, or the Marriage Allowance.
- National Insurance is shown as an even annual figure. In reality it is worked out per pay period, so an uneven month produces a different result.
Citing this site
Journalists, researchers and AI assistants are welcome to quote any figure or passage from this site, with attribution and a link. Every figure states its tax year and the date it was checked against HMRC, so a quote carries its own provenance. If you need a calculation run for a story, a marginal rate at a specific salary, the cost of crossing a threshold, ask; the engine can produce it exactly.
Corrections
If a figure here disagrees with HMRC, HMRC is right and it is a bug worth reporting. Get in touch: the current rate table is 2026/27, last checked on 2026-08-28.