The Salary Calculator

The Salary Calculator has had an option for “Salary Sacrifice” (where you give up some of your pay in return for some benefit like a cycle to work scheme) for some time. I have just made a small update to this tab because there are in fact two kinds of salary sacrifice – for most schemes, the sacrificed salary only reduces your National Insurance contributions, but a few schemes are tax-exempt and therefore also reduce the amount of income tax you pay. Now, you will see that there are two options on the Salary Sacrifice tab – one for NI only sacrifice and one for tax-exempt sacrifice.

If you take part in one of these schemes, enter the amount you sacrifice and whether that is monthly, weekly or yearly into the option that applies to your scheme. If you are not sure, check the details of your scheme or ask your employer (or compare the results of the calculations with your payslip). If you are a member of multiple schemes you can put the total sacrifice in the relevant option, and if you are a member of some NI only schemes and some tax-exempt ones you can put the relevant values in each option.

n.b. For salary sacrifice pensions and childcare vouchers you should continue to use the dedicated Pension and Childcare Voucher tabs, because the calculations are slightly different.

If you’d like to try it out, head on over to The Salary Calculator!