A freeze for most of the UK
Nothing that sets the income tax or National Insurance on a salary in England, Wales or Northern Ireland moved on 6 April 2026. The personal allowance is still £12,570, the basic rate band still ends at £37,700 of taxable income (£50,270 of pay), and employee National Insurance still starts at £12,570 and drops to 2% above £50,270. If your salary and tax code are the same as last year, your take-home pay is the same to the penny, which the impact table shows at eight salaries.
A threshold that stays put while pay rises is a tax rise nobody announces. Each extra pound is taxed at the rate of the band it lands in, so a raise that takes your salary over £50,270 moves part of it from 20% into 40% although no rate changed. The same happens at £100,000, where the allowance starts to shrink by 50p for each extra pound and your marginal rate on that stretch is 60% before National Insurance.
Scotland widened its two lowest bands
The Scottish Government raised the top of the starter band from £2,827 of taxable income (£15,397 of pay) to £3,967 of taxable income (£16,537 of pay), and the top of the basic band from £14,921 of taxable income (£27,491 of pay) to £16,956 of taxable income (£29,526 of pay). The intermediate, higher, advanced and top thresholds did not move, and no rate changed.
More income now falls in the 19% and 20% bands rather than the 20% and 21% ones above them, so anyone in Scotland who earns past the new basic band limit pays a little less tax. The saving stops growing once your salary is above the basic band, which is why the Scotland impact table shows the same small gain at every salary from 30,000 pounds up. Above the basic band, nothing else changed, so a higher earner in Scotland faces the same frozen thresholds as the rest of the UK.
Student loan thresholds rose, and Plan 5 starts
Every student loan threshold that is uprated each year went up: Plan 1 repayments now start at £26,900, Plan 2 at £29,385 and Plan 4 at £33,795. Repayments are a fixed share of pay above the threshold, 9% on Plans 1, 2 and 4, so a higher threshold lowers the repayment by that rate times the rise: on Plan 2 that is the same saving at every salary above the threshold, shown in the third impact table. The Postgraduate Loan threshold stayed at £21,000.
Plan 5 covers students in England who started a course from August 2023. Its first repayments are due from April 2026, at 9% of pay above £25,000, so for those graduates April 2026 is the month their payslip gains a new deduction.
Employers pay the same as last year
Employer National Insurance stays at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year, the rate and threshold that took effect in April 2025. It is not deducted from your pay, but it is part of what your job costs, and it is why salary sacrifice saves your employer money as well as you. To see what any of this means for your own pay, try your salary in the take-home pay calculator.