Tax surface optimiser · UK · 2026/27
See your whole tax landscape — and your single best move
What's the smartest thing I can do with my salary?
Every other calculator shows you one point: your take-home at your salary. This shows you the whole landscape — the traps, the cliffs, the stretches where earning more barely pays — and then runs your situation through thousands of scenarios to find the single move that puts the most money back in your pocket. Enter your details and watch it think.
Verified 12 August 2026
Your tax landscape
Effective marginal rate — how much of your next £1 the system takes — across the salary range. The peaks are the traps. Your position is marked.
This is information, not financial advice. All figures use published HMRC rules for the 2026/27 tax year, computed live in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere. Pension figures assume salary sacrifice. Verified 12 August 2026. How we calculate.
How this works
Your take-home isn't a straight line — it's a landscape with hills and cliffs created by how income tax, National Insurance, the withdrawal of the personal allowance above £100,000, student loans and the Child Benefit charge all stack up at different salary points. This tool computes your take-home at thousands of points along that landscape, measures the marginal rate at each one (how much of the next pound is taken), and then tests realistic moves — extra pension sacrifice, in particular — to find which one buys back the most money from the system for the least cost. It's the difference between seeing a single number and seeing the whole map.