About PayslipIQ
Britain's payslip second opinion. Upload a photo, get instant answers. Built privacy-first and updated for the UK 2026/27 tax year.
To check whether the tax, NI and PAYE lines look right on your own slip, see How do I check my payslip is correct?.

Why We Built This
PayslipIQ started with a simple frustration: a payslip that didn't look right, and no easy way to check it. After changing jobs, the tax code was wrong for three months: resulting in over £400 overpaid. HMRC eventually refunded it, but only after hours on hold and weeks of waiting.
That experience made one thing clear: millions of UK workers receive a payslip every month but have no quick, private way to verify whether their deductions are correct. Tax code errors are common: HMRC's own published reports acknowledge that incorrect codes affect a meaningful share of taxpayers each year, particularly around job changes, benefit changes, and end-of-year reconciliations.
PayslipIQ exists to fix that gap. Upload a photo of your payslip, and within around 30 seconds you'll know whether your tax, NI, pension, and student loan deductions look right: or whether something needs investigating. We also publish decoders for every common HMRC document (P60, P45, P800, P2 coding notice, CIS statements, BR19 pension forecasts), so you can cross-check anything you've received.
How It Works
You upload a photo of your payslip (or use manual entry if you prefer). Our AI reads every figure from the image, then cross-references your tax code, income tax, National Insurance, pension contributions, student loan, and any other deductions against the correct HMRC 2026/27 rates for your pay frequency. If anything looks wrong, we flag it and explain exactly what to do next.
Image handling is privacy-led:
- EXIF metadata is stripped before upload (in your browser).
- The image is processed in memory only on our servers: never written to disk, never put in a database.
- Analysis is performed by Anthropic Claude, our AI sub-processor. Anthropic does not use API inputs to train models and under standard commercial terms may retain inputs for up to 30 days for trust-and-safety review.
- We do not retain payslip contents after returning your result.
Full disclosure on sub-processors, retention windows, and security posture is on our Trust Centre.
Editorial Standards
Every guide and decoder page on PayslipIQ is written to be useful, accurate, and traceable. Our methodology is aligned with HMRC published guidance for the UK and Revenue.ie published guidance for Ireland. We:
- Use HMRC's official published rates and thresholds (currently 2026/27) as the source of truth.
- Cite primary sources (gov.uk, HMRC manuals, ONS, FCA) where claims could otherwise be unverifiable.
- Disclose any commercial relationships in our Advertising and Disclosure Policy.
- Recommend free, independent help (Citizens Advice, StepChange, MoneyHelper, TaxAid, Tax Help for Older People) before any paid product.
- Update the site whenever HMRC changes rates, thresholds, or coding rules.
The full rules, including the review cadence and what this site deliberately does not claim, are in the editorial policy. If a figure here is wrong, the correction policy says how to report it and what happens next.
We are not regulated tax advisers. PayslipIQ is an educational tool. For complex personal cases: multiple employments, share schemes, redundancy, partnerships, VAT, or anything where money has materially gone wrong: please consult a qualified accountant or contact HMRC directly on 0300 200 3300.
Our Principles
Everything we build is guided by four core commitments.
Privacy First
Your payslip image is processed in memory on our servers and not stored or logged. EXIF metadata is stripped client-side before upload. Our AI sub-processor (Anthropic) may retain inputs for up to 30 days for safety review and is not used to train models. See our Trust Centre.
Photo Upload
Snap a photo of your payslip on your phone or drop an image on desktop. Our AI reads the figures automatically: no manual data entry required (manual mode is also available if you prefer).
Free Core, Optional Paid
The core payslip check is and will remain free. We may offer a paid Pro Report (formal HMRC dispute letter) for those who need it. The free check stays free.
Built for the UK
PayslipIQ is built specifically for the UK tax system. Rates, thresholds, and guidance are based on HMRC published rules for the 2026/27 tax year. Scottish (S) and Welsh (C) tax codes are supported.
Who stands behind the numbers
One named person is answerable for every figure published here.
Rocco Clayfield
Founder and Editor
Rocco Clayfield founded PayslipIQ to answer a question payroll departments rarely answer plainly: is this payslip actually right? The site began as a set of working notes on how UK PAYE, National Insurance, pension and student-loan deductions are supposed to behave, and grew into a free checker and a reference library covering the 2026/27 tax year for the UK and Ireland.
He writes and reviews the guides, sets the calculation methodology, and signs off the data studies published at /data. Every rate, threshold and band used on the site is traced to a published primary source — HMRC, legislation.gov.uk, the pay review bodies, or Revenue.ie for Irish pages — and where a figure for the current year has not been published yet, the page says so rather than carrying last year forward.
PayslipIQ is independent. It is not affiliated with HMRC or Revenue, it takes no percentage of any refund, and its output is educational guidance rather than regulated tax, legal or financial advice.
Author and reviewer are the same person. No page on this site has been checked by a second named reviewer before publication, and that is the honest weakness in the arrangement rather than something to paper over. No professional designation, photograph or external profile is published for him, because none has been checked against a public register or a URL that resolves. Four named editor profiles were removed from this site in 2026 for exactly that reason. Each of those is added the day it can be verified, and not before.
Full profile and disclosures · Editorial policy · Report an error
How a figure gets onto this site
- It starts at a primary source: HMRC guidance or manuals, legislation.gov.uk, the relevant pay review body, or Revenue.ie for Irish pages. Never another calculator, and never a news report of a rate.
- Rates and thresholds for the tax year live in one typed constants file that the calculators read from, so the same number cannot be right on one page and wrong on another.
- The worked example on the page is reconciled against those constants, which is what makes the result reproducible without trusting us.
- The page is published with a visible last-reviewed date and the editor's name, and the same date goes into its structured data, so a stale page cannot look current.
- Where a figure for the coming year has not been published yet, the page names the year the figure belongs to instead of carrying the old one forward.
The calculation methodology sets out the rules in full, and the extended worked examples reconcile a full month line by line.
The entity answerable for it
PayslipIQ is a trading name of GoldPaid Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under number 17382540, with its registered office at Unit 217, Bristol Business Centre, 179 Whiteladies Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 2AG. It is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC214216. Both entries are on public registers and both links go straight to them.
Data-protection contact: privacy@payslipiq.co.uk. The Trust Centre carries the data-flow map, the sub-processor list, the DPIA and the transfer impact assessment.
Important Note
PayslipIQ is an informational tool, not a substitute for professional advice. If our analysis flags an issue with your payslip, we recommend signing in to your HMRC personal tax account, contacting HMRC on 0300 200 3300, or speaking to a qualified accountant. See our full disclaimer and Terms of Use.
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