A quiet campaign against fiscal drag

The UK tax system is not complicated by accident. It is complicated because successive governments have preferred to raise money quietly — by freezing thresholds, narrowing allowances, adding surcharges — rather than by the blunter act of raising headline rates. The effect on a payslip is the same. The political cost is not.

This site was built to make those quiet tax rises visible. Every calculator here is tuned to the current tax year. Every guide explains not just the rule but the direction it is travelling in. The aim is boring: to help a person at a kitchen table in Hull, Swansea, Leeds or Peckham understand, inside five minutes, why their take-home pay has not moved the way they expected.

Who runs this

UK Tax Drag is an independent, UK-based editorial project published by Finsolve Consulting Limited and written and edited by one person: its founder, who is the company's director and a CIMA-qualified Chartered Management Accountant with more than ten years in corporate finance. Pages are researched from primary sources (HMRC, GOV.UK, the Bank of England and the FCA), checked against the sources listed on each page and reviewed by the Editor; corrections are logged in the changelog. There is no wider team. The Editor page explains how review works.

For corrections, factual errors, or editorial questions, use the contact form and choose "Factual correction" or "Editorial enquiry".

Every page carries a byline crediting UK Tax Drag and the date the Editor last reviewed it. Pages are general information based on primary sources, not personalised advice.

Our editorial stance

A finance site only works if you can trust it. The incentives on the modern internet are not set up to reward trust — they are set up to reward clicks, conversions and referrals. We have taken a deliberately narrow set of decisions to keep those incentives out.

The site is set up to be funded by display advertising from Google, which can appear on guides, hub pages and calculator pages; until ads run, the publisher meets the running costs, which are modest: a domain name and Netlify hosting. There is no income from affiliate deals, sponsored content or data sharing, and how we make money lists every commercial relationship.

Where readers want a qualified UK adviser

UK Tax Drag is built to help most readers solve most tax questions themselves with calculators and explainers. Where a situation genuinely needs a qualified human - complex multi-income returns, EIS/VCT claims, IHT planning, incorporation decisions, MTD ITSA setup, HMRC disputes - the guide to choosing a qualified UK tax adviser explains which kind of professional fits and how to check a qualification on the CIOT, ATT, ICAEW and ACCA directories or the FCA Register.

That page names no firm, and UK Tax Drag takes no referral fee, commission or other payment from any adviser.

"Beautifully boring" is the house style. Tax is not meant to be exciting. It is meant to be understood.

How the calculators are kept accurate

Every calculator on the site is tied to a specific UK tax year. After each Budget and at the start of each tax year, affected calculators are rechecked against the new rates and rules, and their review date is updated.

High-risk calculators, such as stamp duty and the investment reliefs, also have automated test cases checked before each update, so a change that breaks a known answer is caught before it is published.

The full technical write-up of how each calculation is constructed — the allowances used, the bands applied, the assumptions baked in, and the source documents relied on — lives on the methodology page. Every individual calculator also lists its own sources at the foot of the page.

What UK Tax Drag is not for

Everything on this site is general information, not personal advice. It is written for the great middle of UK financial life: the PAYE employee, the modest self-assessment taxpayer, the first-time buyer, the ISA saver, the auto-enrolled pension holder, the person working out whether to sell a flat.

Some topics are covered at an introductory level only:

• Trusts.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief, Business Relief and Agricultural Relief.
• EIS, SEIS and VCTs.
• Residence and cross-border rules, including non-domicile status and the foreign income and gains regime.
• The Scottish and Welsh income tax bands.

For a decision in these areas, use a specialist: a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) or the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), or of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP) for trusts and estates. The guide to choosing a qualified UK tax adviser explains how to check a qualification.

Editorial review

The Editor reviews calculators and guides before publication, and affected pages are rechecked after each Budget and at the start of each tax year. The review checks rates and thresholds against GOV.UK and HMRC guidance, calculation logic against worked examples, behaviour at band boundaries, and that each cited source still says what the page claims. Pages are drafted, edited and coded with the help of AI tools; the editorial policy explains how that output is checked.

Corrections

We publish openly, so we get things wrong openly. If you spot a factual error — an out-of-date threshold, a broken calculation, a citation that has rotted, a miscounted decimal — please report it via the contact form. Substantive corrections are listed with the date in the changelog, with a short note of what changed.

Contact

Everything reaches us through the contact form. Choose "Factual correction" for errors, "Editorial enquiry" for questions and content requests, "Press or research" for press, partnership (non-commercial), dataset or syndication enquiries, and "Data or privacy request" for anything under UK GDPR.