UK Take-Home Pay by Tax Code Calculator

Your HMRC tax code — printed on every payslip — tells your employer exactly how much of your pay is tax-free before the standard bands apply, and most people never look closely at it because the default (currently 1257L, representing the standard £12,570 Personal Allowance) just works quietly in the background. But a lot of people end up on a different code — BR or D0 on a second job, 0T when a new employer doesn't have your details yet, or a K code that actually adds extra taxable income rather than subtracting an allowance — and each of these produces a meaningfully different take-home figure for the exact same salary. This calculator lets you type in your actual tax code and see precisely what it's doing to your pay.

This is also a useful way to sanity-check whether your tax code looks right — if you're on an emergency or non-standard code and don't know why, comparing the result here against your standard 1257L take-home can make it obvious how much difference it's making, which is worth investigating with HMRC or your payroll team if it doesn't seem right.

A standard L-suffix code's number, multiplied by 10, gives your exact tax-free allowance — 1257L means £12,570, 1100L means £11,000 (a reduced allowance, often due to company benefits like a car). Standard progressive bands (20% up to £37,700 of taxable income, 40% up to £112,570, 45% above) apply to whatever's left after that allowance is subtracted.

A K-prefix code works in reverse — its number times 10 is added to your salary before tax is calculated, representing income or benefits HMRC needs to collect tax on that isn't otherwise being taxed directly. BR, D0, and D1 skip the allowance and banding entirely, applying one single flat rate (20%, 40%, or 45% respectively) to all income under that code — common for a second job, where the tax code assumes your Personal Allowance is already used up by your main job. HMRC caps how much can be deducted under a K code at half of your pre-tax pay in any single pay period, though this calculator shows the full annual figure rather than modeling that per-period cap.

The taxable income figure shows exactly what your specific tax code produces as the amount subject to Income Tax — for most people this is lower than gross salary (an allowance was subtracted), but for K codes it's actually higher than gross salary, which is the detail that most surprises people who've never looked closely at their code before.

If your code doesn't match what you'd expect (for example, you're on BR or 0T but don't have a second job or new employer situation that would explain it), that's worth checking directly with HMRC, since tax codes can become outdated or incorrect and are usually simple to correct once flagged.