The Salary Calculator

Receiving a pension AND employment income

by Admin

The Salary Calculator has had the Two Jobs calculator for a little over a year now. I have had a couple of people contact me and say that they haven’t been able to use it for their situation, which is that they are receiving one income as a pension but they have a second income from a job. The pension doesn’t have National Insurance deducted from it but the job does, and it wasn’t possible to reflect this in the calculator. However, this oversight has now been fixed!

On the Two Jobs calculator, the Additional Options tab now has two extra tick-boxes which you can use to indicate that either the first or second job is a pension (or indeed that they are both pensions). The calculator will then not deduct NI from the job that you say is actually a pension. On all other calculators, where you are only dealing with one income, you can just tick the “I do not pay National Insurance” box if this actually a pension.

Tags: Jobs, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, pension, Pensions, The Salary Calculator

New pension options

by Admin

A while ago, I considered adding an option to the calculator allowing you to enter the amount in £ that you contribute each month, rather than the percentage. I thought this would be useful for people whose employers didn’t use their salary as the basis for the pension contributions but instead “pensionable pay” or something similar. I never got round to it because I thought it was too much of a niche and would make the calculator too confusing. However, the current Coronavirus situation with people being put on furlough made me realise that more people would be affected by this than usual, so I have added this option.

I had an email from a visitor to the site who said that his pension contributions in furlough were based on his full salary, not his reduced, furlough pay. As such, the percentage he was entering was giving the wrong deduction when applied to the reduced pay. To combat this, I have now added the option to switch from a percentage input to a £ input. Enter the amount you contribute, choose the pay period, select what kind of pension you have, and then the calculator will use this amount as your pension contribution. To make this even easier, on the Furlough Calculator you can enter the percentage as usual but tick the “Don’t reduce pension” option, in which case the calculator will automatically apply the pension contributions from your full salary to your reduced salary.

People who contribute to a personal pension (i.e., not through their employer) might also find it easier to use the £ amount option, as it may be easier than calculating the percentage.

Tags: coronavirus, covid-19, furlough, pension, Pensions, The Salary Calculator

Update to Salary Sacrifice options

by Admin

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!

Tags: income tax, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, salary sacrifce, The Salary Calculator

New option – reduced pay

by Admin

With the coronavirus outbreak affecting businesses around the country, a number of employers have had to make the decision to ask staff not to come in to work. The government announced last week that, to encourage employers not to lay staff off, they will pay up to 80% (to a maximum £2,500 per month) of staff members’ salaries if they keep them on the payroll. As well as trying to ensure that employees still receive some pay, the plan is to keep the workers available so the economy is well placed to start up again once the virus threat is reduced.

I have added an option to the existing Pro-Rata Calculator which allows you to enter a percentage of salary instead of reduced hours. Some employers will continue to pay their employees the full amount during the pandemic, others may only be able to pay what they are receiving from the government. And of course, for other reasons you might be receiving a percentage reduction in salary. If this applies to you, enter your full-time salary and full-time hours, then enter the percentage of your salary that you will be receiving. With tax and pension deductions etc taken into account, you might find that the reduction is not quite as bad as you thought. For example, someone on the UK median full-time salary (which is about £30,000) normally takes home £1,915 per month after tax and 5% auto-enrolment pension contributions. On 80% salary, they would take home £1,595, which is a significant drop but still just over 83% of normal. Other deductions like Student Loan repayment could make the overall reduction to a slightly more manageable 85%.

Also of interest might be the new Sick Pay Calculator, which I launched last week to help people who have had to take a short period of time off on reduced pay.

Tags: coronavirus, covid-19, Economy, furlough, HMRC, income tax, layoff, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, pension, pro-rata, reduced pay, student loans, The Salary Calculator, unemployment

New tool – Sick Pay Calculator

by Admin

With many people having to take time off work due to the current situation with COVID-19, I thought I would try to create a sick pay calculator. If you will be taking time off, and your employer’s policy states that you will receive reduced (or no) pay for your time off, the Sick Pay Calculator will try to estimate the effect on your take-home pay.

You can enter the number of days on a percentage of your normal pay (e.g. 50% for half pay), the number of days on Statutory Sick Pay (n.b. the calculator is not able to tell whether or not you are eligible for SSP, learn more from Citizens Advice), and the number of unpaid days. The calculator will use this information to estimate how your payslip will change.

Please note that different employers calculate things like unpaid leave in different ways, so the calculator’s results may differ from those on your payslip. Also, how much you will get paid for time off depends primarily on what your employer’s relevant policies state – you will need to know what you are entitled to before using the calculator.

Please let me know if you have any trouble using the calculator – I’ve tried to reduce the number of unexpected results, but it is possible with a lot of time off and with many options such as pensions and student loans applied that the answers given might be a bit unusual!

Tags: coronavirus, covid-19, HMRC, income tax, Jobs, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, Pensions, sick pay, student loans, The Salary Calculator, unpaid leave