United Kingdom · 2026/27
What your next £100 is really taxed at
Not the band on the rate table — the rate you actually face once National Insurance, the personal allowance taper and student loan repayment are all counted. It peaks well above the top statutory rate, and it does so in the middle of the scale.
Ask what the tax rate is on £110,000 and you will be told 40%. That is the band. It is not what the next £100 costs, which is 62% — and the second number is the one that decides whether the rise, the bonus or the overtime is worth taking.
The gap exists because the things deducted from pay were designed separately and start at different incomes. Income tax has three bands in England and six in Scotland. National Insurance has its own two thresholds, and the upper one sits at £50,270 in both. The personal allowance is withdrawn between £100,000 and £125,140, which is not a rate at all but behaves exactly like one. Student loan repayment starts somewhere else again, depending on the plan. Overlay all of them and the real schedule has nine steps in Scotland and five in England, none of which appears on a rate card.
The tables below were not typed in. They are produced by computing the tax at every step from zero to £180,000, recording where the answer changes, and bisecting each change to the nearest pound. That method has a useful property: the boundaries it finds are the published statutory thresholds — £12,570, £50,270, £100,000, £125,140 — which it was never told. If a parameter is ever mistyped, those move and the build fails. The method in full →
- United Kingdom England & Wales 5 distinct marginal bands. Worst: £100,001–£125,140. 62%
- United Kingdom Scotland 9 distinct marginal bands. Worst: £100,001–£125,140. 69.5%
Side by side
| Salary | England & Wales | Scotland | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| £20,000 | 28% | 28% | — |
| £30,000 | 28% | 29% | 1 pts |
| £45,000 | 28% | 50% | 22 pts |
| £50,000 | 28% | 50% | 22 pts |
| £60,000 | 42% | 44% | 2 pts |
| £80,000 | 42% | 47% | 5 pts |
| £100,000 | 62% | 69.5% | 7 pts |
| £110,000 | 62% | 69.5% | 7 pts |
| £125,000 | 62% | 69.5% | 7 pts |
| £150,000 | 47% | 50% | 3 pts |
The largest gaps are not at the top. Scotland’s higher rate starts at £43,663, below the National Insurance upper earnings limit of £50,270, so that window is taxed at 42% + 8% in Scotland and 20% + 8% elsewhere.
England & Wales in full
| From | To | Marginal rate | You keep | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £1 | £12,570 | 0% | 100% | Below the personal allowance and the NI primary threshold. |
| £12,571 | £50,270 | 28% | 72% | 20% income tax + 8% NI |
| £50,271 | £100,000 | 42% | 58% | 40% income tax + 2% NI |
| £100,001 | £125,140 | 62% | 38% | 40% income tax + 2% NI + plus 20% from losing personal allowance |
| £125,141 | above | 47% | 53% | 45% income tax + 2% NI |
The highest rate in this range is 62%. Rates above the top statutory band are not errors — they are the personal allowance taper, which removes allowance as income rises and so taxes the same pound twice over.
Scotland in full
| From | To | Marginal rate | You keep | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £1 | £12,570 | 0% | 100% | Below the personal allowance and the NI primary threshold. |
| £12,571 | £16,537 | 27% | 73% | 19% income tax + 8% NI |
| £16,538 | £29,526 | 28% | 72% | 20% income tax + 8% NI |
| £29,527 | £43,662 | 29% | 71% | 21% income tax + 8% NI |
| £43,663 | £50,270 | 50% | 50% | 42% income tax + 8% NI |
| £50,271 | £75,000 | 44% | 56% | 42% income tax + 2% NI |
| £75,001 | £100,000 | 47% | 53% | 45% income tax + 2% NI |
| £100,001 | £125,140 | 69.5% | 30.5% | 45% income tax + 2% NI + plus 22.5% from losing personal allowance |
| £125,141 | above | 50% | 50% | 48% income tax + 2% NI |
The highest rate in this range is 69.5%. Rates above the top statutory band are not errors — they are the personal allowance taper, which removes allowance as income rises and so taxes the same pound twice over.
How to read these
A row says: a pound of income in this range is taxed at this rate, counting income tax and employee National Insurance together. The "you keep" column is the complement — what actually reaches you out of the next £100 earned in that range.
Rates above the top statutory band are not mistakes. Between £100,000 and £125,140 the personal allowance is withdrawn at £1 for every £2 earned, so each extra pound is taxed at its own band rate and also pushes a previously tax-free pound into tax. That produces 62% in England and 69.5% in Scotland, neither of which is a rate anyone legislated.
Employer National Insurance is excluded from these tables, because it is not deducted from your pay. It is 15% of everything above £5,000 and it is spent on employing you — counted in, the burden on the job is materially higher than any figure here. That measure is the wedge.
Why the curve is computed rather than quoted
The published rate tables describe income tax on its own. What you actually pay on the next pound is income tax plus employee National Insurance plus any student loan, with the personal allowance taper layered over one stretch and the Child Benefit charge over another — five rules whose thresholds are set independently of each other, and two of them by different parliaments. Adding them up produces a curve with steps nobody legislated.
So the bands above are not transcribed from anywhere. The engine computes the tax at every step across the income range, records where the answer changes, and bisects each change to the nearest pound. The boundaries it discovers are then checked against the published statutory thresholds and the build fails if they disagree — which is how a table generated by search reproduces £12,570, £50,270, £100,000 and £125,140 exactly, without any of those numbers being typed into it. The method page sets out why the probe runs with penny rounding switched off, and why the published ranges are shifted by a pound to match the framing every official table uses.
Why the peak is not at the top
The intuition most people carry is that tax rates rise monotonically with income, so the worst rate must be at the very top. Both curves here contradict it. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the peak sits between £100,000 and £125,140 and then FALLS to 47% above it; in Scotland the same shape appears, and there is a second local peak far lower down where the devolved higher rate begins below the National Insurance upper earnings limit. A rate that falls as income rises is not an error in the table — it is what happens when a withdrawal finishes.
What is deliberately excluded
These curves cover income tax, employee National Insurance, student loan repayment and the personal allowance taper. They exclude employer National Insurance, because it is not deducted from your pay — that belongs in the wedge instead. They also exclude the benefit tapers, Universal Credit above all, which produce marginal rates well beyond anything here but depend on household circumstances an income figure cannot supply.
Two regimes, because income tax is devolved
Scotland sets its own rates and bands on employment income — six against three — while the personal allowance, National Insurance and the student loan thresholds stay UK-wide. The two sets of thresholds therefore cross rather than running parallel, and the difference between the regimes changes sign as income rises: slightly lower in Scotland at the bottom of the scale, higher from the high twenties upward. That mismatch is also what opens Scotland's window around £43,663, where further pay is taxed more heavily than it is twenty thousand pounds further up.