About TruePay UK
A free UK take-home pay calculator built to be accurate, honest, and genuinely clear — because most pay calculators are none of those things.
Why we built it
Almost every UK take-home calculator has one of two problems: it either looks like it was built in 2005, or it quietly gets the hard parts wrong. Most assume a single pension scheme type, skip the Scottish bands, ignore K codes, and never explain the number they give you. TruePay UK exists to fix that — a calculator that handles the real complexity of UK pay and shows its working.
What makes it different
- It gets pensions right. Net pay, relief at source and salary sacrifice each affect your tax and National Insurance differently — we model all three, including the NI saving competitors bury.
- All six Scottish bands, K codes and W1/M1 codes. The bits other calculators skip — see the full tax code library.
- Every rate linked to gov.uk. Transparency instead of disclaimers — the full list is on our sources page.
- A payslip-style breakdown that shows exactly why your pay is what it is, plus plain-English guides for when you want the detail.
- Both employed and self-employed in one place, from PAYE to Self Assessment.
Who’s behind it
TruePay UK is built and maintained by Cascade Digital, a small web studio based in Cumbria. It’s a genuinely independent project — not owned by an accountancy firm, a payroll provider, or a lead-generation business — which means the only job of the calculator is to give you an accurate number, with nothing to sell you off the back of it.
How we keep it accurate
Every rate, threshold and band lives in a single configuration file tied to its gov.uk source, so an update at the Budget flows through the whole site at once. The calculation engine is covered by an automated test suite and checked against HMRC’s own estimator. If you want the detail, our methodology pagewalks through every step of the sum and, just as importantly, is honest about what we don’t handle.
Is it really free?
Yes. No account, no paywall, no cookie banner, and nothing to buy. We use privacy-friendly analytics that set no cookies and collect no personal data — see our privacy page. If TruePay UK saves you a few minutes or helps you understand your payslip, that’s the whole point.