About Real Take Home Pay

Real Take Home Pay is a free UK take-home pay calculator covering income tax, National Insurance, student loans and pensions for the 2026/27 tax year. It is an independent, personal project — it is not HMRC, not a tax adviser, and not affiliated with any government body. Every figure is an illustrative PAYE estimate computed from published rates.

Why it exists

Pay calculators often bury the answer behind sign-ups, adverts or outdated rates. This site exists to give a fast, accurate, transparent answer to one question: how much of a given salary actually reaches your bank account? The answer for a salary is published directly in the page (for example, £30,000 takes home exactly £25,119.60 in England), and the interactive calculator lets you add a pension, student loan or a switch to Scottish tax before your browser has even finished loading.

Who runs it

The site is built and maintained by one independent developer, Efosa ( Efosa.SO), based in the United Kingdom. You can reach him at hi@efosaso.com.

How figures are checked

Rates come directly from HMRC and Scottish Government publications, cited on the methodology page. Before any figure goes live it is verified against independently known-correct examples across every band the calculator covers — including the £100,000 personal-allowance taper, Scottish bands, student loan Plans 2 and 5, salary sacrifice, and special tax codes. The rates card is also published as machine-readable JSON at /data/tax-year/2026-27.json with its source URLs, so anyone can audit the numbers.

How it stays free

No subscription, no account required, no salary data stored. The calculator runs entirely in your browser using the published rate card, so nothing you type is sent to a server. The site is funded and maintained at the author's own cost; a small amount of EU-hosted, privacy-respecting analytics is used to understand which pages help people — see the privacy policy for details.

Contact

Spot a figure that looks wrong, or want a feature added? Email hi@efosaso.com or use the contact page.