UK salary calculator 2026/27

Every deduction, at £35,000

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.

The two deductions look alike and are not

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.

• National Insurance is 8% between £12,570 and £50,270.
• Above £50,270 National Insurance drops to 2%. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland that is also where Income Tax moves to the higher rate, so a pay rise across it is taxed more and charged less National Insurance at once. Scottish rates change at a different point, so the two do not line up there.
• A bonus lands in one pay period, and the two deductions treat that differently. Under a cumulative code the tax that month is worked out on pay to date against a proportion of the bands, so a large bonus can be over-taxed in the month it is paid and refunded through the months after it. National Insurance is not corrected later: the bonus pushes that period above its upper earnings limit and the excess is charged at the lower rate, so a bonus costs less National Insurance than a year's figures imply.

What a pension contribution actually costs

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.

What a student loan adds

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.

The tax code changes this more than anything else on the page

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.

How this compares with the typical UK salary

The Office for National Statistics puts the median full-time salary at £40,911 for the tax year to 5 April 2026, a provisional figure. As if paid this year under 2026/27 rules in England, with no pension or student loan, that median leaves £32,976 a year. The £35,000 worked through above leaves £28,720, and that salary is at about the 37th percentile for full-time jobs, estimated between the published 30th and 40th.