UK National Minimum Wage Calculator

UK employers are legally required to pay at least the National Living Wage or National Minimum Wage for your age group, whether you are paid hourly or on a salary. This calculator checks your actual hourly rate against the current legal minimum, and shows what your minimum weekly and annual pay should be for the hours you work.

How to use the minimum wage calculator

Select your age group, or apprentice status if that applies, enter the number of hours you work in a typical week, and enter your actual hourly rate. If you are paid a salary rather than an hourly rate, divide your gross pay for a period by the total hours you worked in that same period to get an effective hourly rate. The calculator compares this against the current legal minimum for your age group and flags whether you appear to be paid correctly.

How the calculation works

Each age band has its own legal minimum hourly rate, reviewed and usually increased every April. The calculator looks up the correct rate for the age group you select, then multiplies it by your weekly hours to give a minimum weekly pay figure, and by 52 for an indicative annual figure. It compares this against your actual hourly rate, weekly pay and annual pay, and calculates any shortfall if your actual rate falls below the legal minimum.

Worked example

Take someone aged 24, working 37.5 hours a week, paid an effective hourly rate of £11.50. Since they are 21 or over, the legal minimum National Living Wage applies, currently £12.71 an hour, so they are being paid £1.21 an hour short of the legal minimum. Over a 37.5-hour week, their pay should be at least £476.63, but at £11.50 an hour they are only receiving £431.25, a shortfall of around £45.38 a week, or roughly £2,360 a year if this continued unchanged.

Common mistakes to avoid

A common mistake when checking your own pay is forgetting to include all working time in the hours figure, such as time spent on mandatory unpaid training, travel between work locations during a shift, or being asked to arrive early for an unpaid briefing. All of this generally counts as working time for minimum wage purposes, even if it is not separately paid.

Another mistake is assuming tips top up your pay to the legal minimum. Tips and service charges cannot be counted towards minimum wage pay under UK law, so your base pay before any tips must meet the legal minimum on its own. It is also worth checking which age band and rate genuinely applies to you, since the rate changes on your birthday and at the end of an apprentice's first year.

Related calculators

If you want to convert an annual salary into an hourly rate, or the other way round, our salary to hourly rate calculator handles that conversion directly. Once you know your correct hourly rate, our take-home pay calculator shows what you would keep after tax and National Insurance, and our overtime pay calculator works out extra pay for hours worked above your normal week. If you move between employed and self-employed work, our guide to working out your true hourly rate as a freelancer explains why minimum wage rules do not apply to self-employed work, and how to price your own time instead.