Start from what
you want to keep
Name the take-home pay you need, a month or a year, and this works backwards to the gross salary that produces it.
£36,778
To take home £2,500.00 a month, you need a gross salary of about £36,778 a year before tax.
The amount that lands in your account after deductions.
Solving for £30,000.00 of take-home a year.
A pension contribution raises the gross salary you need, because it comes out of gross pay.
Gross a month
£3,064.86
Take-home a month
£2,500.00
- Take-home a year
- £30,000.00
- A month
- £2,500.00
- A week
- £576.92
- Income tax
- £4,841.67
- National Insurance
- £1,936.67
Gross salary is your pay before anything comes out. Take-home is what reaches your bank account after income tax, National Insurance and anything else you chose above. Figures use 2026/27 UK rates.
Your tax position at that salary
You are £13,492 below the higher-rate threshold.
Your next £1 is taxed at an effective 28 percent (20 percent income tax plus 8 percent NI).
A £1,000 pay rise would add £720 to your take-home and £280 to your deductions.
Also check: is your PAYE tax code correct?
A wrong tax code changes your take-home without changing your salary. Check yours free in 60 seconds.
- Gross versus net
- Gross pay is the salary before anything is taken off: the figure in the job advert and the one on your contract. Net pay, or take-home, is what reaches your bank account after income tax, National Insurance and anything else deducted at source. Working out net from gross is arithmetic. Working out gross from net is a search.
Why net to gross cannot be a single sum
UK income tax is charged in bands, and how much of your pay falls in each band depends on the total. You cannot start from take-home and apply a rate backwards, because you do not yet know which rates apply. Divide by 0.8 for basic-rate tax and the answer is wrong the moment any part of the salary reaches the higher rate.
So the calculator searches instead. It guesses a gross salary, runs the full PAYE calculation on it, compares the take-home with your target and narrows the range, over and over, until the two match to within pennies. Every figure it reports is the output of a real calculation at a real salary, not a reverse-engineered rate.
That matters most in the awkward stretches. Between £100,000 and £125,140 every extra £2 of pay removes £1 of Personal Allowance, so a small rise in target take-home needs a large rise in gross salary. A search handles that correctly. A formula does not.
What common take-home targets cost in gross salary
Every row below is the solver's own answer for 2026/27 on England, Wales and Northern Ireland rates, with no pension contribution and no student loan. Add either of those above and the gross salary needed rises, because both come out of gross pay before it reaches you.
| Take-home a month | Take-home a year | Gross salary needed |
|---|---|---|
| £2,000 | £24,000 | £28,445 |
| £2,500 | £30,000 | £36,778 |
| £3,000 | £36,000 | £45,112 |
| £4,000 | £48,000 | £64,556 |
| £5,000 | £60,000 | £85,246 |
Notice how the gap widens as you go down the table. The first £500 a month of extra take-home costs £8,333 of gross salary; the same step higher up the table costs more, because those pounds are taxed harder.
When you actually need this figure
- Negotiating a salary. You know the monthly figure your budget needs. Recruiters and offer letters talk in gross. This converts one into the other before the conversation, not after it.
- Comparing an offer with your current pay. Two gross salaries with different pension rates or student-loan plans can land on very different take-home. Solve both ways round to see which offer is genuinely bigger.
- Setting a contractor day rate. Start from the take-home you want, find the equivalent salary, then work forward to a rate. The hourly and pro-rata calculators do the second half.
- Moving to or from Scotland. Scottish rates change the answer at the same target take-home. Switch the region above to see by how much.
What the estimate does not include
The result assumes a standard tax code with the full Personal Allowance, one job, no taxable benefits in kind, no unpaid tax collected through your code and no other income. Any of those move the real figure, and most of them show up as an unusual tax code rather than as a different salary.
Salary sacrifice is the common case worth modelling separately. Because it reduces gross pay before National Insurance rather than after, the gross salary you need for a given take-home is not the same as it is for an ordinary pension contribution.
- Gross cannot be worked backwards from net with a single rate, because the rate depends on the total.
- The calculator searches for the salary whose take-home matches your target, then shows the full breakdown at that salary.
- Between £100,000 and £125,140 a small rise in take-home needs a large rise in gross pay.
- Pension contributions and student-loan repayments both raise the gross salary a given take-home requires.
Know the salary instead?
The salary calculator runs the same engine the other way round, from a gross salary to income tax, National Insurance and monthly take-home.
Salary after tax calculatorFrequently asked questions
Earn outside PAYE too?
TapTax tracks salary, self-employment and rental income in one place, works out your combined tax bill and files it to HMRC.