Editorial Policy

PayToolkit's calculators and guides are researched and written using official HMRC guidance, legislation, and published rate tables. Key calculators — including IR35, Corporation Tax, Director Salary vs Dividend, and Sole Trader Tax — are reviewed by J Perera (BSc Management, CIMA), a UK-qualified accountant working in UK practice, so the underlying logic has been checked by someone with a professional accounting qualification, not just built from rate tables alone.

We prioritise the calculations and questions UK taxpayers search for most — from take-home pay and Self Assessment to inheritance tax and stamp duty — and build tools that give a fast, accurate estimate without requiring a signup or a spreadsheet.

If a rate, threshold, or explanation is found to be inaccurate or out of date, we correct it as soon as possible after verification. See Methodology for our update process, or contact us to flag an issue.

PayToolkit's calculators are free to use and are not influenced by advertisers. Where we link to a paid partner service (such as our accounting services partner), this is clearly labelled.

Every calculator and guide follows the same path. We start with a question people actually search for, then find the rule in the primary source: HMRC, GOV.UK, or the relevant devolved government. We build the calculation, test it at the points where a rate or threshold changes and against published HMRC figures, and publish it with a "last reviewed" date and the tax year it applies to. The calculators named above also have their logic reviewed by our accountant before release. Every page is reviewed again at the start of each tax year and after any Budget or in-year announcement.

Some parts of PayToolkit are generated from data rather than written one page at a time. This applies to the salary pages (one for each £1,000 step from £10,000 upwards) and to the council tax city and band pages. These pages use the same calculation rules as our calculators, and the council tax figures come from official 2026/27 council tax statistics published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (England), the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government. We check each set of figures against its source before it goes live. Where a generated page does not add enough on its own to be useful, we mark it noindex so it does not clutter search results, and we focus on a smaller number of pages that carry real, salary- or council-specific detail.

When we find a mistake, or someone reports one, we fix it everywhere it appears and record it here. Recent corrections:

• October 2026 — Income Tax between £100,000 and £125,140. Our calculators taxed the part of the Personal Allowance withdrawn above £100,000 at 20% instead of 40%, understating Income Tax by up to £2,514 a year. For example, tax on a £150,000 salary is £53,703, not the £51,189 we previously showed. We corrected the shared calculation in every affected calculator and regenerated all salary pages above £100,000.
• October 2026 — Council tax Band D rates. We replaced the Band D figures for 28 English cities and boroughs, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Swansea with the official 2026/27 published rates, and corrected the England average to £2,392.
• October 2026 — Student loan thresholds and interest. We updated repayment thresholds (Plan 1 £26,900, Plan 2 £29,385, Plan 4 £33,795, Plan 5 £25,000, Postgraduate £21,000) and interest-rate wording to the 2026/27 GOV.UK figures.

To report a possible error, use our contact page and tell us the page, the figure you expected and where you found it. We investigate every report and update the page and this list when a correction is needed.