Is my pay rise actually worth taking?

What the next £1,000 is really worth to you, and which line in the rules is responsible when the answer is less than you’d think.

Nobody warns you that a pay rise has a rate of its own. The band rate on your tax code is what the first pound of your salary pays; the rise pays whatever the rules charge at the top of it, and near a line that can be a great deal more. A rise that takes a higher earner from £70,000 to £73,000 with two children in the house keeps 46p in the pound, not 58p, because the Child Benefit charge is clawing the benefit back at the same time as the tax and the National Insurance. Nothing on the payslip says so. This page does.

How it values the rise

By difference, not by band. It works out the whole position on the old salary and again on the new one, and what the rules took in between is the answer: income tax, National Insurance, student loan repayments, Child Benefit clawed back, each on its own line with the rate it came out at. Working that way is what makes a line inside the rise visible. A rise that starts under £100,000 and ends over it is charged partly at 42% and partly at 62% in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (in Scotland the second part is 69.5%), and a band rate multiplied by the rise would miss the second part entirely.

What it says when the answer is less than you’d think

It names the line. If the rise crosses the £100,000 point, the £60,000 Child Benefit point or a student loan threshold, the result says which one and where, because that is the fact that explains the number. A pension contribution from gross pay lowers the adjusted net income those lines are measured on, and the page that finds the line does that sum: the smallest contribution that brings the figure back under, and what it costs in take-home. Whether that suits you is a different kind of question, and neither page answers it.

What this is, and what it is not

It is arithmetic about the 2026/27 rules for employment income under PAYE, with every figure it used listed under the result and the date it was last read against its source. It is not advice, and it is not a verdict on the rise: what a rise is worth beyond the money that reaches you, the pension it builds, the future rises it compounds into and the job that comes with it, is not something a calculator can weigh. It does not know your tax code, and a real payslip works its sums per pay period rather than per year, so expect a few pounds of difference, not hundreds. For the full sum on the salary itself, start with where your salary actually goes; for the childcare line in particular, this is the page that finds it.