Free tool
Net to gross salary calculator
Someone has agreed to take home a particular figure. This works out the gross you need to put on the contract to get them there — and what the whole thing will actually cost you once the employer contributions are added.
What the employee should receive. Assumes a resident employee on a full month, with no pension, HELB or insurance relief.
Why you can’t just add the deductions back on
The instinct is to take the net, add the PAYE, and call that the gross. It never works, and the gap grows with the salary.
The deductions interact
NSSF, SHIF and the Housing Levy are all taken before PAYE is worked out, so each one lowers the tax as well as the take-home. Raising the gross raises all four at once, in different proportions.
So there is no formula
PAYE is charged in progressive bands, which means the relationship between gross and net has steps in it. The answer is found by searching for the gross that lands on your target, which is what this does.
And the real cost is higher again
The employer contributions sit on top of the gross, not inside it. Agreeing a take-home figure without checking the employer total is the usual way a hire ends up costing more than budgeted.
Going the other way — from a gross figure to take-home — is the PAYE calculator. What each deduction is and which returns it ends up on is covered on the compliance page. As there, no rates or bands are written into this page: they move with each Finance Act, and the calculator reads them from the same statutory configuration Mavuno HR runs payroll on.
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