Estimate UK take-home pay for the 2026/27 tax year with PAYE, National Insurance, pension, student loan, hourly pay, and Scottish tax options.
On £35,000 a year with a standard tax code, take-home pay is £28,719.60 — £2,393.30 a month. Income Tax takes £4,486 and National Insurance £1,794.40; a pension or a student loan comes out on top of both. Every step of that calculation is set out below, and the box below works it for any salary you enter.
Enter a salary for an immediate figure, then adjust pension, tax code, student loan or tax year. Region is set on the full calculator.
Of £35,000.00 gross a year: Income Tax £4,486.00, National Insurance £1,794.40, Take-home £28,719.60.
£35,000 sits in the basic Income Tax band — £15,270 below the higher Income Tax band, which starts at £50,270.
Your next £1,000 keeps £720.00. That is the 28% marginal rate applied to it.
You are £15,270 from £50,270, where the rate on each extra pound becomes 42%.
The two rates answer different questions. The effective rate, 17.9%, is what your whole salary loses. The marginal rate, 28%, is what the NEXT pound loses. A pay rise is taxed at the marginal rate, which is why a raise can feel smaller than the effective rate implies.
Saving £120 a month — about 5% of this take-home — becomes £7,941.48 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 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 salary, using the values below. Open the calculator if your example salary differs.
A salary calculator only ever does two sums, and then adds anything else you tell it about. Here is the whole of it at £35,000, on a standard tax code, with no pension and no student loan.
| Step | Amount | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Gross salary | £35,000 | The figure in the contract, before anything comes off. |
| Personal Allowance, not taxed | £12,570 | The part of the salary Income Tax never touches. |
| Taxable income | £22,430 | Gross minus the allowance. This is what the rates are applied to. |
| Income Tax | £4,486 | Basic rate on all of it, at this salary. |
| National Insurance | £1,794.40 | Charged on the same slice as Income Tax this year, at a different rate. |
| Take-home a year | £28,719.60 | What reaches the bank over twelve months. |
| Take-home a month | £2,393.30 | The figure on the payslip, before anything the employer adds or takes. |
Income Tax and National Insurance both start at £12,570 this year, and both are charged on the £22,430 above it, so at this salary they look like one deduction charged at two rates. They are not, and the difference shows the moment your pay is uneven.
Income Tax on a cumulative code is worked out on the year to date. The allowance builds across the twelve months, so a month where you earn nothing hands its share of the allowance to the next month, and a refund can arrive through payroll without you asking for one. A code marked W1, M1 or X is not cumulative: it treats each pay period on its own and carries nothing forward.
For most employees National Insurance works that second way all the time. It is charged on the pay period in front of it and never looks back, so earn nothing in one month and that month's threshold is simply gone. Company directors are the exception, because their National Insurance is worked out across the whole year.
The figures on this page, and in the box, are annual. They do not model pay-period timing, so they will not reproduce a payslip from a month where pay was unusually high or low.
A 5% auto-enrolment contribution is charged on qualifying earnings — the slice of salary between £6,240 and £50,270 — not on the whole salary. At this salary that slice is £28,760, so the contribution is £1,438 a year. Of that, £1,150.40 leaves your pay and £287.60 is basic-rate relief the scheme reclaims. So take-home falls by £1,150.40 to £27,569.20, not by the full £1,438 that reaches the pension.
That is relief at source, the arrangement most workplace schemes use, and the figures above assume it. Two others exist and they do not produce the same payslip: under net pay the contribution comes off before Income Tax is worked out, and under salary sacrifice your gross pay itself is lower, which reduces National Insurance as well. The method changes the answer, and no calculator can tell which one you are in. The payslip can.
A student loan is not a tax and is not part of the two sums above. It is a percentage of what you earn over your plan's own threshold. On Plan 2 that is 9% of everything above £29,385, so at this salary the repayment is £505.35 a year and take-home lands at £28,214.25.
Plans 1, 2, 4 and 5 share that 9% rate and differ only in where their threshold sits, so the same salary repays a different amount on each. A postgraduate loan is not a variant of them: it uses both a different threshold, £21,000, and a different rate, 6%. Someone holding an undergraduate and a postgraduate loan repays on both at once.
Everything above assumes a standard code. Change it and the arithmetic changes at the first step, because the code is what tells payroll how much of your salary is not taxed.
A BR code taxes every pound at basic rate and gives no allowance at all. On £35,000 that is £2,514 more Income Tax across the year than a standard code. That is not a rounding difference, and not something a payslip announces.
BR can be the right code on a second job, where the first job already uses the whole allowance — but only while the total stays inside basic rate. Above that the correct code is D0, which charges the higher rate on everything it covers. On a first payslip BR usually means the starter declaration told the employer there was another job or pension; where a new employer has no other information the code is normally 0T, or a standard code on a week 1 / month 1 basis.
If the code on your payslip is not the one you expected, the box above takes whatever code you type, which is the quickest way to see what it is costing.
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.
PAYE Income Tax, National Insurance, pension contributions, student loan and postgraduate loan repayments, bonus income and other taxable income. Employer-side costs are not, because they do not come out of your pay.
Yes. The salary setup takes an annual salary or an hourly rate with the hours worked, so an hourly worker can see the annual and monthly figures.
Not accurately. This page works whole annual salaries. A rise partway through the year leaves you on a blend of the two for that year, and under a cumulative code the first payslip after it can carry a correction for the months already taxed at the old rate.
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.