Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

This site (takehome-calculator.uk) is a free utility for UK PAYE and Scottish Income Tax modelling. For the purposes of UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 we are the data controller for any personal data we incidentally process while serving the site, including IP-derived analytics performed by our advertising partner.

You can contact us with privacy questions, data-subject access requests or complaints at [email protected]. If you are not satisfied with our response you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

2. What we do not collect

To be unambiguous about what does not happen on this site:

• We do not transmit your gross salary or chosen region to our servers. The full calculation pipeline is shipped to your browser as JavaScript and executes locally there. You can verify this by opening your browser's Network panel while typing into the salary field — no XHR or fetch request leaves your machine in response to your input.
• We do not ask for, or accept, any account or registration. There is no login, no email gate, no membership.
• We do not store calculation history. Refreshing the page resets the form to defaults.
• We do not use analytics products that fingerprint visitors (no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Mixpanel, no Hotjar, no session-recording tooling).

3. What we do process

3.1 Server logs (legitimate interest)

Our hosting provider — Cloudflare Pages — automatically processes request metadata to deliver the site and protect it from abuse. This includes your IP address, user-agent string, requested URL, response status and a timestamp. These logs are retained by Cloudflare under their own privacy terms and are not exported or aggregated by us. The legal basis is legitimate interest (delivering a working website and protecting it from attacks). See Cloudflare's Privacy Policy for full details.

3.2 Advertising via Google AdSense (consent)

takehome-calculator.uk shows clearly-labelled Google AdSense placements with reserved dimensions, so ads cannot push your content around the page when they load. When you visit the site, Google AdSense may set or read cookies and similar identifiers from your device for the purposes of:

• Selecting and serving the ads you see, including frequency capping;
• Measuring ad performance and detecting invalid traffic;
• Optionally personalising ads based on your prior interactions with Google services — only when you have given consent through the Google-managed consent dialog.

The legal basis for cookies that are strictly necessary to serve the ads is legitimate interest; the legal basis for any personalisation cookies is your explicit consent, recorded via Google's Funding Choices consent banner.

You can withdraw consent or stop personalisation at any time:

• Visit Google Ad Settings to turn off personalised advertising across Google products;
• Visit Your Online Choices to opt out of personalised advertising from participating third-party networks;
• Clear cookies for takehome-calculator.uk, googleadservices.com and doubleclick.net in your browser settings.

Google's full data-processing terms for publishers like us are at privacy.google.com/businesses/adsservices.

3.3 Google Fonts

We load the Inter and JetBrains Mono typefaces from Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com). Google may process your IP address when those font files are fetched. We do not pass any other personal data to Google as part of this request.

4. SalaryGrid.uk handoff link — important disclosure

The calculator includes a call-to-action that links to our companion site, salarygrid.uk, where you can model pensions, student loans and salary sacrifice. To pre-fill that form, your gross salary and chosen region are appended to the destination URL as query parameters — for example, https://salarygrid.uk/salary-calculator?gross=45000&region=rUK.

This handoff is unencrypted in the URL string and is therefore visible to:

• Anyone with access to your own device who can read your browser history;
• salarygrid.uk's hosting provider (Cloudflare), which records the full path of every request it serves;
• Any Google AdSense or analytics scripts loaded on the destination page, which receive the URL as part of their standard page-context data.

It is not visible to your network operator beyond the destination hostname, because the request itself is encrypted over HTTPS — but the parameters do appear in third-party logs on the destination side. If you would rather not pass your salary across the link, simply visit salarygrid.uk/salary-calculator directly and re-enter your figure there.

Browser-memory architecture. Calculations on this site are performed by JavaScript running in your browser's memory; no salary record is written to disk on this site's servers or our hosting provider's storage. The handoff URL above is the single, explicit exception: when you click it, the value you typed is transmitted to salarygrid.uk so the destination form can pre-fill — which is the entire purpose of the link. If you never click it, the value never leaves your device.

5. Cookies — full inventory

We do not set any first-party cookies of our own. The list above is indicative — Google occasionally updates the names of its cookies; the authoritative current list is published by Google at policies.google.com/technologies/cookies.

6. Your rights under UK GDPR

Because we deliberately hold almost no personal data, most data-subject rights resolve trivially: there is nothing to access, nothing to rectify, nothing to erase, nothing to port. The rights still formally apply, and they are:

• Right of access. You can ask us what personal data we hold about you. Our standard reply is "request metadata in Cloudflare logs, indexed only by IP address, retained per their policy."
• Right to rectification.
• Right to erasure ("right to be forgotten").
• Right to restrict processing.
• Right to object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interest (e.g. ad-serving cookies that aren't strictly necessary).
• Right to data portability for any personal data processed on the basis of consent or contract.
• Right to lodge a complaint with the ICO at ico.org.uk.

For any request, please email [email protected]. We aim to respond within one calendar month.

7. International transfers

Cloudflare and Google operate globally; your request and any ad-serving traffic may be processed in jurisdictions outside the UK. Both providers rely on UK International Data Transfer Agreements (or equivalent Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum) to legitimise those transfers.

8. Children

This site is aimed at working adults paying UK Income Tax. We do not knowingly process the personal data of children under 13. If you believe a child has interacted with the site in a way that requires intervention, please email [email protected].

9. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when our processing changes — most likely if we add or remove an advertising partner, or if the law changes. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page is authoritative; for significant changes we will surface a notice on the home page for a reasonable period.