About Take Home Planner

A free, independent planner for one question that the big salary calculators skip: what happens to your pay, your pension and your benefits when you change how much you put into your pension, and how you put it in.

Why it exists

Most take-home pay calculators treat a pension contribution as a single number. In reality the mechanism matters: salary sacrifice, a net pay arrangement and relief at source produce different take-home figures for the same contribution, and the choice interacts with the withdrawal of the personal allowance above £100,000, the High Income Child Benefit Charge, the £100,000 childcare cliff edge, and from 2029 the cap on salary sacrifice. Take Home Planner puts all of that on one page and shows the trade-off in plain numbers: how much a pension pound costs you in spending money.

Who builds it

Take Home Planner is an independent UK project, built and maintained by an IT professional with more than twenty years of engineering experience. It started as a private spreadsheet for a salary sacrifice decision and became a website when the spreadsheet kept being borrowed. It has no connection to any employer, pension provider or financial firm.

What is here

• The salary calculator — what any salary is worth after income tax, National Insurance and a student loan, by year, month and week, for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
• Salary after tax tables — a page for every salary from £15,000 to £200,000, with the same breakdown worked out in advance, plus the effect of a student loan and a pension contribution.
• The salary sacrifice calculator — the three ways of paying into a workplace pension compared side by side, with the income thresholds that are worth staying under.
• The annuity estimator — what a pension pot would buy as a guaranteed income, and what annuity rates are doing today.

How the figures are kept right

Every rate and threshold lives in one file with a link to the GOV.UK or gov.scot page it came from, and the calculation engine is covered by automated tests that check it against worked examples and against established calculators. The engine is updated on the day new rates are published, with a note of what changed. If you spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us; corrections are made quickly and credited.

The annuity estimator and daily annuity rates price annuities from Bank of England gilt yields and Office for National Statistics life tables, both published under the Open Government Licence, and are checked weekly against published best-buy tables. How annuity rates are worked out explains the method and its accuracy.

Independence

The site does not sell or recommend financial products and is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, because it does not need to be: it gives general information, not advice. If adverts or partner links are ever added they will be clearly labelled and will not change the numbers.