About this site
Not financial or tax advice. This site provides educational estimates. It is not affiliated with HMRC. For your own tax position use HMRC or a qualified accountant or tax adviser.
Who publishes this site
How Much Tax Do I Pay? is built and operated by Zen Web Studios Ltd. You can reach us via the contact details on our company site or through contact@howmuchtaxdoipay.com for site-related enquiries. Legal terms for using the site are in our Terms of Use; privacy is covered in our Privacy Policy.
What the calculator does
The tool runs in your browser. It estimates income tax and employee National Insurance from your gross pay, tax year, and region (including Scotland where applicable). It then layers modelled indirect taxes and charges—such as VAT on a share of spending, fuel duty, alcohol duty, council tax, and the TV licence—using public statistics and sensible defaults so you can explore a wider effective tax rate than PAYE alone.
Data sources and updates
Rate and threshold data are sourced from official and reputable public datasets, including HMRC (income tax and NI), ONS (household spending patterns), Ofgem / Ofwat (utility context where relevant), DLUHC (council tax averages), and other government publications. A manifest of tax years and JSON files ships with the site; we update figures when budgets and published sources change. The “where does tax go” chart uses HM Treasury spending categories for a stated year and scales them to your modelled total tax for illustration.
Known limitations
We do not model every personal factor: student loans, high-income child benefit charge, marriage allowance transfers, multiple jobs, benefits-in-kind beyond the simple EV and cycle fields, self-employment, dividends, capital gains, or localised council tax bands. Take-home pay on the payslip can differ from our PAYE block if your code, benefits, or deductions differ. Indirect tax blocks use averages, not your receipts.
Historical tax years
Each past year has its own URL (for example /2024-25/) with meta tags and a static summary of key rates for that year so crawlers and users see year-specific content, not only a changed title.
Further reading on this site
Guides: Take-home pay, Scottish income tax, Effective tax rate, Salary sacrifice, Marginal tax rates.