Reverse salary solver · UK · 2026/27
Describe the life you want. Get the exact salary.
What salary do I actually need?
Every other calculator asks for your salary and tells you what's left. This does the opposite — the genuinely hard direction. Tell it the life you want to fund: what you save, where you live, whether you're buying a home, how you spend. It runs the real UK tax engine backwards, across all your goals at once, and finds the exact gross salary that delivers them — plus the smartest way to structure it.
Verified 12 August 2026
We'll make sure your salary clears the typical 4.5× mortgage multiple for the mortgage portion.
If hitting your goals would land you in the £100k–£125k trap, we'll find a pension structure that keeps you clear.
Information, not financial advice. Uses published HMRC rules for the 2026/27 tax year and typical city living costs, computed live in your browser. Housing uses a 4.5× mortgage multiple and 10% deposit as a lender-typical guide. Verified 12 August 2026. How we calculate.
Why running it backwards is the hard part
Working out take-home from a salary is easy — one calculation. Working out the salary from a desired take-home is genuinely hard, because the relationship isn't a straight line: as your salary rises, the proportion you keep changes — National Insurance steps down at £50,270, the personal allowance is withdrawn above £100,000, student loans kick in at their thresholds. So there's no simple formula to reverse. This solver searches the salary space, running the full tax calculation at each point, and converges on the exact figure where your take-home covers every goal you've set — then checks whether a pension structure could hit the same goals for less gross. That's constraint-solving over a non-linear surface, done instantly.