How we work out the numbers

The three rules #

• Your numbers, our arithmetic

  A tool never guesses what your business looks like. If a figure is about you, you typed it. If it is a rate that applies to every employer in the country, it comes from the list at the bottom of this page.

• No industry averages

  You will not find "the average small business loses eleven hours a week" anywhere on this site, because that number does not describe your business and nobody can show you where it came from. Where we do use a public figure, it is linked, dated, and narrow enough to be checkable.

• Nothing leaves your browser

  The tools run in the page. There is no account, no email gate and no submission. If you choose to bring a result to us, the link fills it into the form on our homepage and you can edit or delete it first.

The working year #

Statutory paid holiday in the UK is 5.6 weeks, which is where the familiar 28 days for a five day week comes from. So the year a salaried person is actually at work is 46.4 weeks, and that is the basis we use whenever a tool turns a salary into an hourly figure.

Sickness, training and the days nobody is truly productive are deliberately left out. Including them would make every number we show you bigger, which is exactly why we do not.

What an employed hour really costs #

A salary is not what an employee costs. For the 2026 to 2027 tax year the two additions that apply to almost every employer are:

• Employer National Insurance 15%

  Of earnings above the secondary threshold of £5,000 a year, with no upper limit.

• The workplace pension 3%

  A minimum employer contribution of qualifying earnings, which is the slice of pay between £6,240 and £50,270, not of all pay.

Pension, holiday, sick pay, equipment, software seats and recruitment fees all sit on top of this and vary too much between businesses for us to assume them. Where a tool lets you add them, it asks.

Hours, not savings #

That is not modesty, it is the only honest position before anyone has looked at how your week actually runs. What a job could hand over depends on how consistent it is, what it touches, and how much of it needs a person to decide something, which is what the free audit is for.

Rounding, currency and dates #

Money is rounded to the nearest pound, hours to the nearest hour, and nothing is rounded more than once. Everything is in pounds sterling and every rate is the one in force in the 2026 to 2027 tax year. National Insurance and pension thresholds change on 6 April; the minimum wage changes on 1 April. Each page carries the date its figures were last checked.

If you think a number is wrong #

Tell us and we will fix it. Email dev@interactivecode.co.uk with the page and the figure. A tool that is quietly wrong is worse than no tool, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.