Top 1% salary UK: the quick answer
The UK top 1% threshold is £201,000 of annual taxpayer income before tax. That figure comes from HMRC's Survey of Personal Incomes (SPI) for tax year 2022/23 — the latest release, published March 2025. It's the 99th-percentile cut point in HMRC's taxpayer-income distribution for tax year 2022/23, not a salary survey.
Around 340,000 individuals sit in the top 1% band. They earn 13.3% of total UK income and pay 28.2% of all Income Tax (HMRC percentile-share tables for 2024/25). The £201,000 threshold itself rose only about 1% on the previous year's £199,000 — a small move that partly reflects more taxpayers entering the system, which widens the denominator at the very top.
Top 1% threshold
£201,000
99th percentile, HMRC
People in band
~340k
2024/25 estimate
Share of UK income
13.3%
Of total taxpayer income
Share of Income Tax
28.2%
Of all UK Income Tax paid
What £201,000 actually looks like after tax
Above this threshold, the UK system stacks three distinct marginal rates in a narrow band — which is why the effective tax rate on top-1% income doesn't feel like a clean 45%.
£100,000 to £125,140: the Personal Allowance tapers away at £1 for every £2 earned, creating a 60% effective marginal rate in this range once Income Tax (40%) and the loss of the Personal Allowance are combined. National Insurance on top adds 2% above the Upper Earnings Limit. Anyone approaching or inside this band often redirects additional pay into pension contributions via salary sacrifice to flatten the effective rate.
£125,140 and above: the Personal Allowance is fully withdrawn and the 45% additional rate kicks in. Someone earning exactly £201,000 loses around £80,500 to Income Tax and NI combined in 2026/27, taking home roughly £120,500 — an effective rate near 40% of gross. The PayPrecise calculator on this page applies the live 2026/27 bands to give the exact breakdown including any Scottish residency difference (the Scottish top rate is 48% above £125,140).
The income composition at this level also shifts. IFS research on the UK top 1% shows that partnership and dividend income together account for over a quarter of total top-1% income — compared to near-zero at the median, where employment income is almost everything. That matters from April 2026, when dividend tax rises by 2 percentage points on the basic and higher bands (to 10.75% and 35.75%); the additional-rate dividend rate stays at 39.35%.
What's changed around this threshold
Three live policy moves have reshaped what it means to earn near the top 1% threshold over the last few years:
1. The additional-rate threshold was cut from £150,000 to £125,140 in April 2023. That single change widened the group exposed to the 45% band. HMRC's latest Personal Incomes Statistics release shows around 0.6 million additional-rate taxpayers in 2022/23, and HMRC says the unchanged threshold was one factor behind that increase.
2. The tax threshold freeze was extended to April 2031 at Autumn Budget 2025 (Finance Act 2026). The £100,000 Personal Allowance taper point, the £125,140 additional-rate threshold and the £50,270 higher-rate threshold are all frozen in cash terms until 2030/31. For someone earning near £201,000, that means every nominal pay rise now lands disproportionately in the 45% band — and the 60% effective-rate zone between £100,000 and £125,140 keeps widening in real terms as inflation erodes its edges.
3. The threshold is not the same thing as a PAYE salary cutoff. HMRC's Survey of Personal Incomes includes taxable employment income, self-employment profits, pensions, savings and dividend income. So the people just inside the top 1% are not all employees on identical £201,000 salaries.
Taken together, the OBR forecasts the threshold freeze alone will bring an extra 600,000 additional-rate taxpayers into the 45% band by 2030/31 on top of the 0.6 million already there. The top 1% is a moving benchmark; the number of people sitting inside it keeps growing.
Using this page well
Use £201,000 as the clean benchmark answer, then use the calculator above for the 2026/27 take-home figure on any specific gross salary. The threshold is HMRC taxpayer income, not ASHE employee salary — a small part of top-1% income comes from self-employment profits, dividends and taxable pensions, which ASHE doesn't cover. For the full ASHE-basis UK median salary figure, see Median Salary UK; for a side-by-side rank against every other percentile point, see the salary percentile calculator. For a full take-home breakdown on incomes at this level, the £200k take-home page handles the maths.