About Take-Home Compass

What is on this site

12 guides, each with its sources on the page , 55 answers to the questions around them , and the comparison.

• Calculate my take home pay: Take-home pay in the United Kingdom is the salary less two statutory deductions, Income Tax and Class 1 National Insurance, and then less anything you have chosen or been enrolled into: a workplace pension, a student loan repayment, a benefit in kind.
• IR35 rules: The off-payroll rules are not one rule but two regimes wearing one name, and which of them applies to your engagement is decided by the size of the client rather than by anything you or your agency does, so the first question in any IR35 conversation is who the end client is and how big they are.
• Inside IR35: Inside IR35 means the engagement is treated as employment for tax, so a deemed employer takes Income Tax and employee National Insurance out of the fees before your company or your umbrella sees them, and the honest comparison for a contractor is not inside against outside but inside against the salary an employee doing that job is paid with holiday, sick pay and a pension attached.
• Outside IR35: Outside IR35 means the engagement is genuinely a business-to-business supply rather than employment in disguise, the fee reaches your company gross, and the take-home then depends on how you draw it, so the question worth asking is not how to get an outside determination but whether the engagement can honestly bear one.
• Inside vs outside IR35: The difference between inside and outside IR35 is usually explained with adjectives and is only ever settled with arithmetic: the same day rate produces two different net figures because one route runs employment deductions through a deemed employer and the other pays a company gross and leaves the drawing decisions to you.
• IR35 calculator: An IR35 calculator is only useful if it is honest about which rate you have typed in, because an assignment rate that has to carry employer National Insurance and an umbrella margin is not the same money as a day rate paid gross to your company, and most disappointment with these tools comes from that one conflation.
• IR35 check and CEST: Checking an IR35 position means two separate things that get confused: HMRC's own CEST tool, which gives HMRC's view of employment status from the answers you give it, and the client's determination, which is the document that actually governs how you are paid and which you are entitled to see with its reasons.
• Contractor take-home: Contractor take-home is the same arithmetic as any other take-home with two extra decisions in front of it, the status of the engagement and the route you are paid through, and a calculator that hides either of those behind a single optimistic number is why so many contractors are surprised by their first quarter.
• Day rate calculator: Turning a day rate into an annual salary is the arithmetic contractors get wrong most often, because the conversion everybody uses multiplies by a full working year while the year that actually happens contains holiday, illness, and the weeks between one contract ending and the next starting.
• Trade day rates: A trade day rate is a price, not a wage, and the gap between the two is everything a self-employed tradesperson funds out of it: unbilled travel and quoting time, tools, van, insurance, holiday, sick days and the tax that arrives twice a year rather than every Friday.
• Contract salary figures: The salary figures contractors search for are almost always the wrong end of the comparison: what a permanent salary leaves after tax is a fixed calculation, while what a contract leaves depends on billable weeks, status and route, and the useful question is what rate makes those two numbers meet.
• IR35 news and changes: IR35 has been announced, reformed, postponed and reported as abolished often enough that a contractor can be forgiven for not knowing which regime they are in, so this page records what the current guidance says and the date it was read, rather than what a headline once suggested was about to happen.

Where the figures come from

Take-home figures computed by the estate's payroll engine (packages/hub-kit/src/payroll) over statutory rates quoted verbatim from official pages on the dates shown; every rule file re-verified against the live page.

Reach us

Contact for a question about the site, or contact@takehomecompass.com. The legal terms are on Terms and Privacy.