Scottish Budget Impact Calculator (2027/28 vs 2026/27)

One tool, two modes

Every calculator on this site runs on this year's rates. This one asks a different question: what would next year's look like for you? Before the Scottish Budget is published it is a modelling tool — the six bands start as 2026/27's and you change whichever threshold or rate you want to test. On Budget night the announced 2027/28 bands are loaded here, with a link to the document they came from, and the same page shows the real change instead of a hypothetical one. You can still branch off the announced set to model an amendment.

The calculation is the Scottish Income Tax Calculator's, run twice. Nothing is estimated: the difference between the two runs is the change, band by band, to the penny.

What a Scottish Budget can and cannot change

Scotland sets the rates and thresholds of the income tax on your earnings, pension and rental income — the six bands from Starter at 19% to Top at 48%. Everything else on a payslip is reserved to the UK Government: the Personal Allowance of £12,570, frozen until April 2031; National Insurance; the student loan thresholds; and the tax on dividends and savings interest. So the calculator holds those constant and lets you edit only what Holyrood can move. If the UK Autumn Budget changes one of the reserved figures, every calculator on the site changes with it, but that is a different event from the one modelled here.

The shape recent Budgets have taken

Recent Scottish Budgets have moved the Starter and Basic thresholds and left the Higher, Advanced and Top thresholds frozen. The “Starter & Basic only” button reproduces that shape for any percentage you choose; “Every threshold” models the uprating that has not happened. A frozen threshold is not a neutral choice: as pay rises, more of each salary sits above £43,663 and is taxed at 42%. To see what that costs you, enter the salary you expect to be on next year rather than the one you are on now, and leave the bands unchanged — the extra tax is the drag.

For journalists and researchers

The address of this page carries the whole scenario: salary, pension contribution and all six thresholds and rates. Set the bands to a proposal, copy the link, and anyone who opens it sees the same bands with their own salary — and the ladder table shows the change at ten salaries from £20,000 to £150,000 without entering anything. Rates are read from the site's single rates file, which is verified against the published tables and dated on every calculator page. Our summary of the last Scottish Budget covers what changed for 2026/27.