About and methodology

How Tax Receipt works

Tax Receipt is a free UK calculator that works out your income tax and employee National Insurance and shows roughly what they pay for, using HM Treasury's spending figures. It is free, and all the sums are done in your browser.

Working out your tax

The calculator applies the official rates for the tax year you pick (2024/25, 2025/26 or 2026/27) to a salary from one job. Income tax uses the Personal Allowance of £12,570, which falls by £1 for every £2 earned over £100,000, then the bands for England, Wales and Northern Ireland or Scotland's own six bands. Employee National Insurance is 8% on earnings between £12,570 and £50,270 a year and 2% above. Tax codes such as 1100L, K475, BR and D0 change the allowance or rate as HMRC sets out.

Student loan repayments are worked out from each plan's yearly threshold and shown separately. They reduce take-home pay but are not tax, so they are left out of the spending split.

The figures are annual, so payslips can differ by a few pounds because payroll rounds each pay period. Pension contributions, benefits in kind, savings, dividends and second jobs are not included.

Splitting your tax across public spending

Income tax and National Insurance go into one pot with other taxes and borrowing, so no pound is tied to any one service. The split shows what your tax would buy if it were spent in the same proportions as the government's total spending on services.

  1. Start from HM Treasury's spending by function for 2025-26 in the Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA), from social protection (£407.3bn) to culture and recreation (£15.1bn), £1227.9bn in all. Debt interest is shown as its own line rather than inside general public services. Accounting adjustments that are not spending on any service are left out.
  2. For the six areas HM Treasury can attribute to a nation (health, education, public order and safety, social protection, economic affairs, and housing), scale each total by how much is spent per resident in your nation compared with the UK average, using the Country and Regional Analysis. Defence, debt interest, the environment, culture and other public services are UK-wide and not adjusted.
  3. Put the results back to 100% and share out your income tax plus National Insurance in those proportions.
  4. Round each line so the lines add up exactly to your total. Shares, pounds and pence are each rounded this way (the largest remainder method), so a share times your total can differ from its pound figure by a pound or two.

Checking and updates

Tax rates come from GOV.UK, HMRC and the Scottish Government, and spending figures move to the newest PESA when HM Treasury publishes it, usually in the summer. Each page says when its rates and spending data were last checked. The salary pages use the same rules as the calculator and are checked against hand-worked examples for England and Scotland every time they are rebuilt.

The tax history page applies every year's rules from 1976/77 to the same real salary, using ONS inflation figures, and has its own sources.

What this is not

This is an estimate, not tax or financial advice. For your exact tax, use your payslip, your HMRC personal tax account or HMRC's own calculators. Official statistics and rates are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Sources