The Salary Calculator

New – see the effects of benefits in kind

by Admin

The Salary Calculator has been updated with new options, to help those who receive taxable benefits, or “benefits in kind”, from their employer. As well as paying you your salary, your employer might offer other benefits, such as a company car or private healthcare. They pay for these benefits directly, but you have to pay tax on the value of the benefit (generally, you do not pay National Insurance on these benefits). Sometimes this extra tax is collected through your tax code – it lowers your tax-free personal allowance so that you pay the extra tax automatically. However, you may not know what your tax code will be with this benefit, or your employer might deduct the extra tax directly.

If this is the case, you can now enter the value of the benefit into the “Taxable Benefit” tab on the calculator, choose whether this amount is weekly, monthly or yearly, and then run the calculations to see how it affects your take-home pay. Since the amount of tax you pay will go up when you receive one of these benefits, your take-home pay will go down – but of course you’ll be receiving the benefit that you’ve paid tax on. This information will help you see how much the benefit will actually cost you each month.

To get started, head over to The Salary Calculator.

Tags: benefits in kind, childcare vouchers, income tax, Pay As You Earn, personal allowance, tax rates, taxable benefits, The Salary Calculator

New – see your tax broken down by tax rate

by Admin

I’ve had requests in the past from users of the site saying that it would be useful to see a breakdown of your income tax, showing how much of it was in which tax band. Well, it took a while to get round to it, but now you will see in the results table that if you hover the mouse over the tax deductions, you get a list showing you how much of that tax was at 20%, how much at 40%, etc.

Of course, for a lot of people this will just be at 20%. If you earn a little more, though, you’ll pay some tax at 40% and those who are fortunate enough to earn over £150,000 will be paying some tax at a rate of 45%.

I recognise that there’s a little more work to be done on this – sometimes you might see there’s a discrepancy of 1p in the values (this is just because of rounding up / down and is pretty hard to avoid), and at the moment it’s not possible to see a breakdown of tax when you’ve received a bonus. I know that bonus time is when a lot of people move up into a new tax threshold so I will work to add that in the future, I promise!

If you want to have a go and try it out, here’s where to go: The Salary Calculator

Tags: bonus, income tax, Pay As You Earn, tax rates, The Salary Calculator