Estimate what a pay rise means for gross salary, monthly take-home pay, income tax, NI, pension, and student loan deductions.
A £3,000 rise on £35,000 is worth £2,160 a year after tax, or £180 a month — about 72% of it, on a standard England, Wales or Northern Ireland code. Enter your old salary and new salary below for the monthly take-home uplift on your own figures. How much of a rise you keep depends almost entirely on where it lands, and the table below shows why.
Enter your current and new salary. The difference shown is after tax, not before.
Gross is up £3,000, but take-home rises by £2,160 — £180 a month.
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.
Planning estimate only. Pay-event outputs cannot confirm real payroll treatment, HMRC records, employer policy, employment terms, or payslip timing.
| Tax year | 2026/27 |
|---|---|
| Gross increase / month | +£250 |
| Income Tax impact | £600 |
| National Insurance impact | £240 |
| Student loan impact | £0 |
Pay-rise comparisons run the old and new annual salary through the same shared PAYE assumptions to show the gross and estimated take-home difference.
| 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 pay rise, using the values below. Open the calculator if your example salary differs.
The share of a rise you keep is not a single number. It falls as pay rises, and then in one stretch it falls off a cliff and climbs back afterwards, which is why two people can get the same rise and keep very different amounts of it.
| Salary before the rise | Band the rise falls in | Kept of £1,000 | With a Plan 2 loan |
|---|---|---|---|
| £30,000 | Basic rate | £720 | £630 |
| £60,000 | Higher rate | £580 | £490 |
| £110,000 | Inside the Personal Allowance taper | £380 | £290 |
| £130,000 | Additional rate | £530 | £440 |
Read the third row against the fourth. On £110,000 a £1,000 rise keeps £380; on £130,000 — £20,000 higher up — the same rise keeps £530. More salary, more kept per pound.
The reason is that the Personal Allowance is withdrawn between £100,000 and £125,140, and is finished before the fourth row. Across that band every extra £2 of pay also takes away £1 of allowance, so £3 becomes taxable for every £2 earned. That is what turns the higher rate into an effective 60% across that slice. By the fourth row there is no allowance left to take, so an extra pound carries only the additional rate and National Insurance, which is why a rise is worth more there than lower down.
The 60% is not a published rate and appears in no rate table. The withdrawal behind it does show, as a reduced number on the tax code.
Add a student loan and the third row keeps £290. A Scottish taxpayer on those figures keeps £305, or £215 with the loan.
A student loan repayment is a percentage of everything over its threshold, so once a salary is past that threshold the loan takes the same slice of every extra pound as it does of the rest. On Plan 2 that is the difference between the last two columns of the table: £90 of every £1,000, at every salary in it.
There is no upper limit to it. Unlike the allowance withdrawal above, the percentage does not change with salary, and it is worked out on gross pay rather than on pay after tax, so the same pounds carry both. It runs while a balance is outstanding: repayments stop once the loan is cleared, and a plan is written off a set number of years after repayment first became due.
For a contractor a rise is quoted per day, and what it is worth depends on how many days get billed. A £50-a-day increase is £13,000 a year if every weekday is billed, and £11,000 on the day count this site plans with — a difference of £2,000 before any tax is worked out.
The box above compares two annual salaries, so a day-rate rise has to be annualised before it goes in. The day-rate page works that day count through in full.
The calculator runs the old salary and new salary through the same PAYE settings, so the gross increase and the estimated net increase are compared on like terms.
This estimate is worked out on £35,000 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.
Enter the old and new salaries to estimate the monthly take-home uplift after Income Tax, National Insurance, pension and supported student-loan settings.
The extra salary can increase Income Tax, National Insurance, pension deductions and student-loan repayments, so the net uplift is usually lower than the gross rise.
No. This page compares annual salary levels for planning. A real mid-year payslip can also include payroll timing, back pay or tax-code adjustments.
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.