Convert an hourly rate to an annual salary and UK take-home, and see how the paid-weeks convention and rolled-up holiday pay change the result.
An hourly rate becomes an annual salary when you multiply it by your weekly hours and by the paid weeks in your year. The weeks figure is the part calculators disagree on: 52 whole weeks, the calendar year divided by seven, or only the weeks worked. This page multiplies by 52 weeks, and the worked example shows what each convention gives.
Enter your rate and hours. Annual pay and take-home both follow.
Of £29,250.00 gross a year: Income Tax £3,336.00, National Insurance £1,334.40, Take-home £24,579.60.
Saving £100 a month — about 5% of this take-home — becomes £6,617.90 in five years at an example 4%: try the savings calculator.
2026/27 rates, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, no student loan. Open the full calculator to change region, student loan or pension method.
Payslip showing different figures? The payslip checker works out what your pay and tax code should have produced and shows which assumption could explain the gap.
| Tax/source year | 2026/27 |
|---|---|
| Region | England/Wales/Northern Ireland |
| Tax code basis | 1257L where the page uses PAYE defaults |
| Pension basis | No pension deduction unless this example says otherwise |
| Student loan basis | No student loan unless selected in this example |
| Gross pay | Employment pay before PAYE deductions and pension or loan settings. |
|---|---|
| Income Tax | Tax estimated from the selected tax-year, region, tax code and taxable-pay assumptions. |
| National Insurance | Employee NI is calculated separately from Income Tax and may not follow the same bands. |
| Pension and loans | Pension method and student-loan plan can change take-home pay and payslip comparisons. |
| Pension contribution | Changing the rate or method can change taxable income, National Insurance and take-home pay. |
|---|---|
| Tax code and region | Scottish Income Tax, Welsh codes, emergency tax or a non-standard tax code can move the result. |
| Student loan plan | A different plan can change deductions because each plan uses its own threshold and repayment rate. |
| Bonus, overtime or second job | Extra pay and payroll timing can make a real payslip differ from the smooth annual estimate. |
| Tax code | HMRC tax-code changes, K codes, BR/D codes, or emergency markers can change PAYE deductions. |
|---|---|
| Cumulative basis | Week 1, Month 1 or non-cumulative payroll can differ from a smooth annual calculator estimate. |
| Pension method | Relief at source, net pay and salary sacrifice can affect taxable pay and take-home pay differently. |
| Payroll timing | Bonus, overtime, arrears, refunds, cut-off dates and corrections can all move a single payslip. |
| Why is the tax on my payslip higher than expected? | payslip difference |
|---|---|
| What do the main payslip lines mean? | payslip explainer |
| What tax code should I use for modelling? | tax code |
| How much does pension reduce take-home pay? | pension comparison |
| How does this affect a monthly budget? | budget planning |
| What is not decided here | PayBreakdown does not decide payroll correctness, lender approval, benefit entitlement or employer compliance, and does not give regulated financial, mortgage, debt, tax, payroll or legal advice. |
|---|
The figures on this page are worked from hourly to salary, using the values below. Open the calculator if your example salary differs.
52 whole weeks is the common default and the one this page uses. It suits salaried pay, where the hourly figure is a base rate and paid leave is taken on top of it. Whole weeks land a day short of a calendar year, and two short of a leap year. Dividing a 365-day year by seven closes that gap and gives about 52.14 weeks, which is why another calculator can return a slightly larger annual figure from identical inputs. The third convention multiplies by the weeks actually worked, and it belongs only to a rate that already carries the holiday element. Weekly hours are a separate input, whatever you actually work; these three conventions differ only in the weeks.
Statutory holiday entitlement is 5.6 weeks of paid leave a year. Take that out of a 52-week year and 46.4 weeks are left, which is the part of the year a worker is at work. The weeks-worked figure is therefore the working part of a full paid year, not a year with unpaid time in it, and a shorter multiplier is never a licence to drop the holiday out of the total. Irregular hours and part-year workers are entitled to paid holiday too, and for leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024 their entitlement builds up as 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period rather than being credited as a fixed number of days at the start.
Rolled-up holiday pay is the other arrangement those reforms allow for irregular hours and part-year workers: rather than paying holiday when leave is taken, the employer adds a percentage to the pay for the work done in each pay period. It is the same 12.07%, used for a different quantity, and the two are worth separating because one is counted in hours and the other in money. As entitlement, 12.07% of the hours worked accrues as paid leave. As rolled-up pay, 12.07% is added to the pay for those hours, so the rate on the payslip sits above the base rate. The number is shared because 5.6 weeks of leave leaves 46.4 working weeks, and 5.6 is about 12.07% of 46.4. A rolled-up rate multiplied by the weeks worked therefore lands on the same annual total as the base rate multiplied by the full year, which is the point of rolling it up.
Take the calculator's default of £15 an hour for 37.5 hours a week, which is £562.50 a week before deductions. Across 52 whole weeks that is £29,250. Across about 52.14 calendar weeks it is £29,330, roughly £80 more for identical work. Now the two ways of getting the holiday wrong, one either side of that figure. Put the base rate across only the 46.4 weeks worked and you get £26,100, which drops £3,150 of paid holiday out of the year. Roll the holiday up instead and the rate becomes £16.81: across 46.4 worked weeks that returns £29,250, back to the base-rate answer, but across 52 weeks it returns £32,780, counting £3,530 of holiday pay a second time.
The floor is unaffected by how you annualise. The National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage apply to the hourly rate itself, at a level set by age and apprentice status, and are worked out for each pay reference period rather than across a year. The uplifted rate above is an annualising device for this page's arithmetic and not a minimum wage comparison: which payments count towards the floor is a payroll question, and this page does not answer it. This page estimates pay; it does not decide whether an employer has met the floor.
Hourly pages annualise an hourly rate using weekly hours, then pass the annual salary through the same PAYE-style take-home estimate used by salary pages.
This estimate is worked out on £29,250 annual gross. Change any of those and the take-home figure moves; pension method and student loan plan usually move it most. A payslip can differ from any calculator because payroll works pay period by pay period, so a tax-code change, a bonus, arrears or a refund can land in one month and not the next. See how each deduction is worked out.
Common hourly rates for part-time, full-time and shift-work comparisons.
Higher hourly rates for professional, overtime and contract-style comparisons.
37 pages in this set, each showing the calculation for a different figure.
It multiplies your rate by the hours you enter and by 52 weeks, then runs that annual gross through the tax estimate. The weeks are fixed here and there is no control for them. If your own year runs to a different number of paid weeks, work the annual figure out first and enter it in the annual salary calculator instead.
Divide its annual answer by your hourly rate and then by your weekly hours. What comes out is the multiplier it applied, and it is usually one of the three. The rate and the hours agree between tools; the multiplier is what does not.
The weeks you actually work. Your contract or payslip should state whether holiday pay is rolled up, and if it does not say either way, ask payroll before you pick a multiplier: the two readings are thousands of pounds apart over a year on a full-time rate.
The examples use standard annualised assumptions. If paid weeks, unpaid leave or variable hours matter, open the calculator and adjust the hourly setup.
Last updated 2026-08-27. Checked by Sean Elsmore. Rates last checked against GOV.UK on 2026-08-07. Estimates are for planning and should be checked against official records where the decision matters.