Your payslip is a menu now: salary sacrifice, share schemes and the £100k line.

A few of you have emailed me recently about versions of the same thing, and it kept rattling round my head, so I wanted to write it down properly.

It's always some flavour of this: "I've got my pension going out before tax, there are one or two electric cars on the salary sacrifice scheme, I buy some shares from my gross pay, and I'm trying to keep half an eye on whether I tip over £100,000. Is there a way to just… see the whole picture?"

One reader has exactly that — two EVs on salary sacrifice, share purchases from gross pay, a bonus that moves around each year, and a nagging sense that all of it is quietly interacting in ways a payslip never spells out. They're right. It is.

And something's changed. For a lot of people, the payslip stopped being a single number a while ago. It's a menu. Once you're picking things off that menu — pension, cars, shares, cycle schemes, health cover — the figure that actually matters isn't your salary at all. It's your adjusted net income. So let me walk through how the pieces fit, plainly, because almost nobody gets it laid out for them.

What's actually on the menu

Most of these schemes work in one of two ways, and the difference is the whole game.

Some come off your pay before tax and National Insurance are worked out. That's what "salary sacrifice" means — you agree to a lower headline salary in exchange for the thing.

• Pension salary sacrifice is the cleanest example. The money leaves your gross pay, so your taxable salary drops by exactly that amount.
• The EV car scheme works the same way on the way out — the lease comes off your gross pay. There's a twist I'll come back to.
• Share Incentive Plan (SIP) partnership shares are bought from gross pay too, so they lower your taxable salary as well. That's the "shares from gross" a lot of you mean.
• Cycle-to-work sits in the same bucket.

Others don't touch your gross pay. A Sharesave (SAYE) scheme is bought from your net pay, so it doesn't change your taxable income at all — a really common mix-up. And some benefits push the other way entirely: private medical cover your employer pays for is usually a taxable perk, so it gets added to your taxable income rather than taken off it. A company car does the same.

So the menu isn't all pulling one direction. Some items lower the number the taxman cares about; some raise it. Which is exactly why it helps to see them all in one place instead of guessing.

Most people don't use half of what they've got

Here's the bit that genuinely surprises me. Time and again, the people writing in are the ones who've already worked this out. For every one of them, there are a load of colleagues sat next to them who have no idea their workplace even offers half of this — the EV scheme, the share plan, the extra pension options, sometimes a health cash plan they've never claimed a penny from.

A payslip won't tell you what's on the shelf. It only shows what you've already picked. So if any of this is news to you, the person who can actually tell you what's available is your HR team or your manager — and it's worth asking, because a surprising number of people never find out what they're entitled to in the first place. To be clear, that's a chat about what your employer offers and how it works — not financial advice. Whether any of it fits your situation is a different question, and I'll come back to who that one's for.

One caveat: if you run the business, this lands completely differently. There's no HR department to ask, because you're the one deciding what to set up in the first place — so the same schemes become a question of what you put in place for yourself and your team, usually alongside your accountant. Different seat, same menu.

The number underneath it all: adjusted net income

Adjusted net income is, roughly, your total taxable income for the year — salary, bonus, taxable benefits, savings and dividends — with a couple of things like personal pension contributions and Gift Aid taken back off.

The salary-sacrifice items I mentioned are already out of your taxable salary, so they've done their work before you even reach this number. The taxable perks are in it. Bonus and overtime are in it. And that combined figure — not your salary — is what a surprising number of UK rules quietly key off.

Once you're picking things off the menu, the number that matters isn't your salary. It's what's left after the menu.

Why the £100,000 line matters so much

Here's why people write to me sounding slightly stressed about one specific number. At £100,000 of adjusted net income, two things happen, and both are sharp edges rather than gentle slopes:

• Your personal allowance starts disappearing. For every £2 you go over £100,000, you lose £1 of your tax-free personal allowance, until it's gone at £125,140. You're losing tax-free allowance and paying tax on the income, so the effective rate across that band works out around 60% — a genuinely odd stretch where earning a bit more is taxed harder than the "top" rate.
• If you've got young kids, the childcare support stops dead. Tax-Free Childcare and the free-hours entitlement both cut off entirely the moment adjusted net income goes a single pound over £100,000. Not tapered — gone. For a family using both, that can be worth thousands a year, which means £1 over the line can cost you far more than £1.

That's what makes this worth understanding rather than ignoring. Most tax thresholds are gradual. These two are cliffs. So where you land relative to £100,000 isn't a rounding-error question — it's the difference between keeping your personal allowance and your childcare, or losing them.

The parts that are moving

What makes it properly fiddly is that the rules don't sit still, and a couple are shifting in ways worth knowing about:

• The electric-car twist I promised. When you take an EV on salary sacrifice, the lease comes off your gross pay — but the car is a taxable benefit, so a slice gets added back to your taxable income. For electric cars that slice has been tiny, but it climbs: the benefit-in-kind rate goes from 3% this year up through 4%, 5%, 7% and 9% by the end of the decade. So an EV's effect on your numbers isn't fixed — it drifts each year as those rates step up.
• Pension sacrifice and National Insurance. From April 2029, only the first £2,000 a year of pension salary sacrifice keeps its National Insurance saving; above that, NI starts applying again. Electric-car schemes sit under different rules and aren't touched by that change. Worth having the calendar in your head, because "how much am I saving" won't stay a flat answer.

None of this is a reason to do anything in particular. It's a reason to be able to see it, because a picture that's accurate this year won't automatically be accurate in three.

One note if you're in Scotland

Because I'm up in Edinburgh, I always flag this. The £100,000 thresholds — the personal-allowance taper and the childcare cliff — are UK-wide and identical wherever you live. But income-tax rates are different in Scotland, so the exact effect of any of these schemes on your take-home lands differently up here. Plenty of calculators quietly assume rest-of-UK rates and get Scottish figures wrong. If you're Scottish, it's one to double-check — the calculator above lets you switch the region so the tax saved is worked out on the right bands.

Where WealthR fits — and where it doesn't

I built this next bit because I kept getting the emails. There's now a way in WealthR to put your salary, your bonus, your pension sacrifice and your EV scheme in one place and just see your adjusted net income — how close you are to £100,000, and how each lever moves it. It shows you the number. That's the job.

What it deliberately won't do is tell you what to do with that number. I'm not an adviser, WealthR isn't regulated to give advice, and whether any of these schemes suit you depends on your whole situation — your pension allowances, your goals, your family, things a calculator can't see. That question is for you and a qualified, FCA-regulated adviser. What WealthR can do is make sure that when you have that conversation, you're both looking at an accurate picture instead of a payslip and a hunch.

That's the whole point of it, really. The modern payslip hands people more choices than it ever has, and almost no way to see how they add up. If that's you, it's worth an hour to map it out once — because the £100,000 line doesn't care whether you meant to cross it.

— Liam

Frequently asked

This is general information about how UK tax rules and workplace schemes work, not financial, tax or investment advice, and not a personal recommendation. Figures and thresholds are for the 2026/27 tax year and can change. WealthR is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. For decisions involving pensions or significant sums, please speak to a qualified, FCA-regulated adviser or a tax professional.