Income tax calculator Scotland — methodology

The calculation, in order

1. Start from earned income: employment income, pensions, rental profit, self-employed profit. Not savings interest, not dividends, not capital gains.
2. Deduct the personal allowance that applies to that income. It is a UK figure, not a Scottish one, and above £100,000 it is withdrawn at £1 for every £2 of income, with the surviving amount rounded up to a whole pound as ITA 2007 s.35(3) requires.
3. Apply the six Scottish bands to what is left, in order, each pound at its own rate.

taxable income = earned income − personal allowance(earned income)
income tax     = schedule[scotland].earned applied to taxable income

schedule[scotland].savings  = the UK savings schedule
schedule[scotland].dividend = the UK dividend schedule
schedule[scotland].gains    = the UK gains schedule

The last three lines are not a simplification made by this page. They are how packages/tax-core/src/rules/2026-27.ts composes the Scottish region: one Scottish earned schedule and the same savings, dividend and capital gains schedules every other part of the UK uses.

Two ways of writing the same six thresholds

The rules files store the Scottish thresholds as taxable income — income after the personal allowance. Every table published by gov.scot and gov.uk states them as gross income. They are the same six boundaries through one subtraction, and this calculator shows both because a reader who compares the stored figures to a government table would conclude the page is wrong.

The top row is why this is an inverse and not an addition. Adding the personal allowance to each taxable threshold gives the published gross figure for the first five bands and the wrong answer for the sixth: the top rate starts at £125,140 of taxable income, and at that level of gross income the taper has already removed the personal allowance entirely, so gross and taxable coincide. The naive addition would put the top band a personal allowance too far away for every taxpayer in Scotland. The conversion used here is the inverse of the allowance function itself (apps/web/lib/grossIncome.ts), which is right in all three régimes — flat allowance, taper, and no allowance left.

What Scotland sets, and what it does not

• Set by the Scottish Parliament: the rates and thresholds applied to non-savings, non-dividend income — the six bands above.
• Reserved to the UK Parliament: the personal allowance and its taper; the rates on savings interest and dividends; capital gains tax; and National Insurance, which is not devolved in any part of the UK.

The consequence a reader meets first is that a Scottish higher-rate taxpayer with savings interest is charged the UK higher rate on it, not the Scottish one — and that the personal savings allowance itself is set by which UK band the taxpayer reaches, so a Scottish intermediate-rate taxpayer is a UK basic-rate taxpayer for that purpose.

Rates and allowances

Thresholds in this table are taxable income, after the personal allowance. The savings and dividend rows are read from the Scottish region and are the UK schedules, which is the point rather than an accident of presentation.

Sources

• gov.uk — Income tax in ScotlandHMRC’s own statement of which income the Scottish rates apply to, and which they do not.
• gov.scot — Scottish income tax rates and bandsThe published page still titles its table “Proposed Bands”. The bands are in force: the Scottish Parliament agreed the Scottish Rate Resolution, motion S6M-20844, on 19 February 2026, and the resolution is the legal authority for the figures used here.
• gov.uk — Income tax rates and allowances: current and pastThe personal allowance, which is reserved to the UK Parliament and is the same in Scotland as everywhere else.
• gov.uk — Income over £100,000The allowance taper, a UK-wide rule that applies to Scottish rates and produces the highest marginal rate on the page.

Five things this calculation does not model, stated here rather than buried

• National Insurance. Not devolved, not included. It is deducted from the same earnings, so what this page leaves over is not take-home pay. The take home pay calculator for Scotland adds it.
• Student loan and postgraduate loan repayments, including Plan 4 — the Scottish plan, whose threshold differs from the plans used elsewhere in the UK.
• Pension contributions. computeTaxPosition takes a pension contribution and extends the rate limits for relief at source, but this page passes neither, so anyone contributing is shown more income tax than they owe. The pension tax relief calculator models the band extension.
• Tax codes and the transferable allowances. The standard personal allowance is assumed. A benefit in kind, an underpayment collected through PAYE, the marriage allowance and the blind person’s allowance all move it — and every gross band boundary moves with it.
• Savings interest, dividends and capital gains. Charged on UK-wide bands wherever in the UK you live. This page takes no figure for any of them.