Salary to real hourly rate (after UK tax)
Job ads quote a salary; what you actually feel is the hourly rate that lands in your account. This tool applies the UK 2025/26 income tax bands and employee National Insurance to show what each working hour is genuinely worth after tax.
Real hourly rate (after tax)
£14.73
Based on 1,950 paid hours a year
- Take-home pay (per year)
- £28,720
- Income tax
- £4,486
- National Insurance
- £1,794
- Gross hourly rate
- £17.95
2025/26 England, Wales & NI bands
Two people on the same £45,000 salary can have very different hourly worth. Someone contracted for 35 hours across 46 working weeks is selling far fewer hours than a colleague grinding 45 hours over 50 weeks — yet both see the same number on the contract. Dividing take-home pay by the hours you actually give the job is the only way to compare roles, shifts or that tempting pay rise that comes with longer days.
The calculation mirrors how HMRC stacks the charges. Your personal allowance comes off first, then the remaining income is taxed at 20%, 40% and 45% as it climbs through the bands. Employee National Insurance is layered on top at 8% up to the upper earnings limit and 2% beyond it. Take-home is simply gross minus those two, and the real hourly rate is take-home divided by the hours and weeks you enter.
Use it to sanity-check overtime, a four-day week, or a job offer in a different city. If a £5,000 raise comes with five extra hours a week, the real hourly figure will often barely move — and sometimes it falls. Seeing the after-tax number per hour makes those trade-offs obvious in a way an annual salary never does.
Frequently asked questions
- Which tax year does this use?
- The 2025/26 UK tax year: a £12,570 personal allowance, 20% basic, 40% higher and 45% additional rates, plus employee National Insurance of 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above. These are clearly labelled constants in the code so they can be updated each April.
- Does it cover Scotland?
- No. The figures use the England, Wales and Northern Ireland income tax bands. Scotland has its own rates and bands (starter, basic, intermediate, higher, advanced and top), so a Scottish taxpayer's take-home will differ. National Insurance is the same UK-wide.
- Why is my 'real' hourly rate so much lower than the headline figure?
- Because the headline divides gross salary by hours, while the real rate divides your take-home pay by hours. Income tax and National Insurance typically remove 20–35% of a middle income, so the gap between the two numbers is exactly what HMRC takes.
- Does it include pension, student loan or salary sacrifice?
- Not yet — it deliberately keeps to tax and NI so the result is easy to verify. A workplace pension or student loan repayment would reduce your take-home further, so treat this as the best-case after-tax figure.
- What happens to my personal allowance over £100,000?
- It tapers: you lose £1 of allowance for every £2 you earn above £100,000, which is why earnings between £100,000 and £125,140 carry an effective ~60% marginal rate. The calculator handles this automatically — watch the real hourly rate barely move in that band.
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