How much of your salary do you actually keep? From £15k to £250k
We put every salary from £15,000 to £250,000 through our take-home pay calculator. The results show four tax bands, two sweet spots, and one strange zone where a pay rise is worth barely a third of itself.
Everyone knows a pay rise does not all land in your pocket. What is less obvious is how differently it lands at different salaries, and that there is one stretch of the pay scale where earning more is startlingly close to a waste of time. So we ran every salary from £15,000 to £250,000 through our take-home pay calculator, on the 2026/27 rates for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and lined the numbers up.
Your take-home always rises with your salary, of course. What falls, and does not fall in a straight line, is the share of it you actually keep.
What you take home
The table below is the headline picture: gross salary, the take-home left after income tax and National Insurance, what that is a month, and the percentage of the whole salary you keep.
| Salary | Take-home (year) | Per month | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| £15,000 | £14,320 | £1,193 | 95.5% |
| £20,000 | £17,920 | £1,493 | 89.6% |
| £30,000 | £25,120 | £2,093 | 83.7% |
| £40,000 | £32,320 | £2,693 | 80.8% |
| £50,000 | £39,520 | £3,293 | 79.0% |
| £60,000 | £45,357 | £3,780 | 75.6% |
| £80,000 | £56,957 | £4,746 | 71.2% |
| £100,000 | £68,557 | £5,713 | 68.6% |
| £110,000 | £72,357 | £6,030 | 65.8% |
| £125,140 | £78,111 | £6,509 | 62.4% |
| £150,000 | £91,286 | £7,607 | 60.9% |
| £200,000 | £117,786 | £9,816 | 58.9% |
| £250,000 | £144,286 | £12,024 | 57.7% |
At £15,000 you keep more than 95 per cent of your salary; by £250,000 you keep barely 58 per cent. That much is expected. The interesting part is not the take-home itself but the rate at which each extra pound is taxed, which is where the pay scale stops behaving sensibly.
Four bands, and one quirk
Two taxes shape all of this. Income tax has a tax-free personal allowance of £12,570, then 20 per cent to £50,270, 40 per cent to £125,140, and 45 per cent above that. National Insurance is charged at 8 per cent between £12,570 and £50,270, and then, and this is the quirk, it drops to 2 per cent above £50,270. So at the very point your income-tax rate jumps from 20 to 40 per cent, your NI rate falls from 8 to 2.
Put the two together and what matters is the combined rate on your next pound, which is the number that decides whether a rise is worth chasing.
| Slice of income | Income tax | NI | You keep of the next £1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to £12,570 | 0% | 0% | 100p |
| £12,570 to £50,270 | 20% | 8% | 72p |
| £50,270 to £100,000 | 40% | 2% | 58p |
| £100,000 to £125,140 | 40% + lost allowance | 2% | 38p |
| Above £125,140 | 45% | 2% | 53p |
Read that last column from top to bottom and you can see the strange dip. You keep 72p of each extra pound as a basic-rate earner, 58p as a higher-rate one, and then, in the £100,000 to £125,140 band, only 38p. That is less than the 53p kept by someone on £250,000. For that one stretch of salary, the tax system treats a middling six-figure earner more harshly than a very high one.
The two sweet spots
There are two thresholds worth knowing. The first is the £12,570 personal allowance: earn below it and you pay no income tax or NI at all, which is why part-time and lower-paid work keeps almost all of its value. The second is £50,270, and it is gentler than its reputation. Crossing into the 40 per cent tax band sounds brutal, but because NI simultaneously drops from 8 to 2 per cent, the marginal rate rises only from 28 to 42 per cent, not to the 48 you might fear. The higher-rate threshold is a step, not a cliff.
The 60 per cent trap
The cliff is at £100,000, and it is the reason a chunk of the pay scale behaves so oddly. Above £100,000, your personal allowance is withdrawn at a rate of £1 for every £2 you earn, disappearing entirely by £125,140. Losing that allowance means an extra slice of your income becomes taxable, so each additional pound is taxed at 40 per cent directly, plus a further 40 per cent on the 50p of allowance it strips away. That is an effective 60 per cent income-tax rate, and with 2 per cent NI on top, you keep just 38p of every pound earned between £100,000 and £125,140.
The effect is easiest to feel as a pay rise. A move from £100,000 to £110,000, a £10,000 rise, lifts take-home by only £3,800. The same £10,000 rise from £200,000 to £210,000 adds £5,300. A pay rise is literally worth more to someone on £200,000 than to someone on £110,000, which is not how anyone assumes tax works.
For parents of young children it can be sharper still. Crossing £100,000 of adjusted net income also ends eligibility for tax-free childcare, worth up to £2,000 per child a year, and for the government-funded childcare hours in England. A modest rise over the line can therefore leave a family with young children genuinely worse off, once lost childcare support is counted. The same £100,000 line that quietly covered our frozen tax thresholds piece is doing a lot of hidden work here too.
Out the other side
Oddly, things ease once you clear the trap. At £125,140 the personal allowance is already gone, so there is nothing left to withdraw, and the marginal rate settles to the 45 per cent additional rate plus 2 per cent NI. You keep 53p of the next pound again, more than the 38p you kept a few thousand pounds earlier. The 60 per cent zone is a pothole in the middle of the road, not the end of it.
What people do about it
This is why financial advisers see so much pension activity clustered around £100,000. Because the trap is driven by adjusted net income, paying into a pension or using salary sacrifice lowers the figure the taper is measured against, and can pull an income back under £100,000 to reclaim the allowance. In the trap, a £1 pension contribution can cost as little as around 40p of take-home once the reclaimed allowance is counted, which is an unusually good deal. None of this is advice, and the right move depends entirely on your own circumstances, but it explains the behaviour.
The broader lesson from the whole range is that your salary and your marginal tax rate are two different things, and it is the second one that decides what a rise is really worth. Our take-home pay calculator shows the take-home for any salary and, just as usefully, what any rise actually adds after tax and National Insurance, so you can see exactly where on this curve you sit.
This is general information, not financial advice. Figures use 2026/27 rates for England, Wales and Northern Ireland with the standard tax code; Scotland has its own income-tax bands. Your own position depends on your tax code, pension contributions, student loan and other circumstances. Childcare rules are set by the government and depend on adjusted net income.
Sources
Photo by Alaur Rahman on Pexels.
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