Payroll & take-home

Package: PAYROLL_PACKAGE. Registered by createEngine(); for a slimmer engine, register it explicitly (see choosing packages).

Take-home pay is what actually reaches your account after a salary has had income tax and National Insurance taken off. Reading a payslip, or working out what a raise is really worth, means running those bands, which is exactly the fiddly arithmetic a calculator should do. Write the salary and ask for it after tax.

£50,000 after tax // £39,519.60
take home on £30,000 // £25,119.60
£120,000 after tax // £76,157.40

per month after tax gives the monthly take-home rather than the annual:

£60,000 salary per month after tax // £3,779.78

The salary has to be in pounds, because these bands are British. A salary in another currency, or a bare number that names no currency at all, is refused rather than answered: the bands would produce a confident figure about a country they say nothing about. What to write instead is on the line below.

A rate you state

Everywhere the bands do not reach, state the rate instead. Nothing about this form is national, so it works on any currency and on a bare number.

£50,000 after 20% tax // £40,000.00
$50,000 after 20% tax // $40,000.00
50000 after 20% tax // 40,000

It is the same take-home question with the arithmetic stated rather than looked up, which is what anyone outside the UK needs, and what anyone on a flat rate, a contractor rate or a rate they are modelling needs too.

An hourly rate

hourly for is a plainer sum: the gross salary as an hourly rate, on a full-time year of 1,920 hours (a 40-hour week across 48 weeks), before any tax. No bands are involved, so it takes any currency.

hourly for 45000 // 23.44
hourly for $45,000 // $23.44

Which figures these are

The bands are the full HMRC figures for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, tax year 2026/27: the £12,570 personal allowance, tapered away £1 for every £2 earned over £100,000; income tax at 20%, 40% and 45%; and employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% above.

A tax year has to be chosen, because take-home depends on one. Solve uses the latest year it ships figures for, and that is a fixed table rather than a year read off today’s date: a new tax year the package has no figures for would otherwise be answered with the previous year’s, silently. The employee figures above are unchanged across 2024/25, 2025/26 and 2026/27, so a salary answers the same in all three; the package carries a table for each, so the year a future Budget moves is one table beside its neighbours.

Scotland sets its own income tax bands and is not covered here. That is the same boundary the tax rule draws, and the same one the pound requirement above draws: a rate that is not shipped is not assumed, rather than quietly giving a Scottish salary an English answer, or a dollar salary a British one. after 20% tax is the form for every case the table does not describe. The figures cover a straightforward employee on the standard tax code; a different code, pension contributions, or student loan repayments change the real number.