£30k after tax UK (2026/27)

Tax and National Insurance breakdown for £30k

The table below shows the main Income Tax and National Insurance deductions for this salary, so you can see how the take-home figure is built up.

Worked example: how £30k becomes £25,120 net

The calculation starts with gross salary of £30,000. The available Personal Allowance is £12,570, leaving £17,430 of taxable income. Income Tax is approximately £3,486 at basic rate, £0 at higher rate and £0 at additional rate. Employee National Insurance adds roughly £1,394.

That leaves estimated take-home pay of £25,120. Use this as a starting point before adding pension contributions, salary sacrifice, student loan repayments, Scottish tax bands or taxable benefits.

Student loan impact on £30k

At this salary level, the type of student loan plan you are on can make a noticeable difference. The calculator above starts with no loan, so use this table as a quick comparison before testing your own settings.

Student loans are normally calculated from gross income above the relevant threshold, not from your take-home pay.

The line worth staring at is the gap between Plan 2 and Plan 5. Two people on the same £30,000 salary, with the same degree, can pay £55 a year or £450 a year purely depending on when they started university. Plan 2 (courses started between 2012 and 2023) has a £29,385 threshold, so at £30k it barely registers. Plan 5 (courses from August 2023) starts repaying at £25,000, so the same salary triggers about £38 a month. Neither person chose this. It is an accident of start date, and at this salary it is the single biggest deduction difference between otherwise identical payslips.

Scottish graduates on Plan 4 pay nothing at all here, because their £33,795 threshold sits comfortably above the salary. If you are weighing up a pay rise, remember the 9% only applies to income above your threshold, so a £1,000 rise costs a Plan 5 borrower £90 of it, not 9% of everything.

Pension contributions at £30k

A 5% pension contribution on £30,000 puts £1,500 a year into your pot. The good news is it never costs you the full £1,500. Through salary sacrifice, the contribution reduces your taxable pay, so you save 20% Income Tax and 8% National Insurance on it. Take-home falls by about £1,080 a year, roughly £90 a month, while the full £1,500 lands in the pension.

If your scheme deducts pension after National Insurance instead (a net pay or relief at source arrangement), you keep the tax saving but not the NI saving, so the monthly cost is nearer £100. Either way, the gap between what you give up and what you get is the quiet argument for not opting out of auto-enrolment at this salary, especially before employer contributions are even counted. Use the calculator above to test your own percentage; the pension field handles it.

Where £30k sits in the UK income distribution

A gross salary of £30,000 is close to the HMRC median taxpayer-income benchmark of £29,700 and below the top-25% benchmark of £45,000. That means it sits around the middle of UK taxpayers’ individual income before tax, not around the middle of household income or take-home pay.

These ranking points use HMRC Survey of Personal Incomes benchmarks for tax year 2023/24, published 29 April 2026. They compare individual total income before tax — not household income and not take-home pay. It is separate from the ONS full-time-employee salary median, so a salary can be above the HMRC taxpayer midpoint while still below the full-time salary median. For a deeper benchmark, compare this salary with the median income benchmark.