About this site

Who

This site is built and maintained by Rakesh Choudhary, who is responsible for the formulas, the source verification, defects and user reports. It is not affiliated with the Local Government Association, the National Joint Council, any trade union, or any employer.

Why it exists

A pay award is announced as a percentage. What you want to know is what lands in your bank, and in which month. Between those two things sit a national circular, your employer’s payroll cycle, a pension tier, and — if you work in Scotland or Northern Ireland — a completely different set of numbers from the one being reported. Nobody was putting that together accurately. That is the whole of it.

It began with the NJC local government spine and now covers NHS Agenda for Change across all four nations, which is the larger part of the site.

How a figure gets onto this site

Every number is transcribed from a named, dated document — never calculated by applying a percentage to last year, which is how rounding errors get in. The document is pinned by its file hash where it is a PDF, so a silent republication is detectable.

Nothing is trusted after one reading. A second, independent pass re-reads the same document by a different method — glyph coordinates rather than text lines — and every value must agree before a record is marked verified. Where a second reading is impossible, the figures are instead re-derived from the rule that produces them: NHS pension thresholds, for instance, are regenerated from the legislated figures using the indexation rule in the regulations themselves.

The build refuses to publish data that is missing, inconsistent, or has not been re-verified in 120 days. Every safeguard has a test that breaks it deliberately, because an untested safeguard is not one. The methodology sets all of this out; the source register lists every document behind every figure.

What the checking has actually caught

This is not a theoretical process. Reading the primary documents rather than a summary has found, among other things: a widely-used pay site stating the wrong working week for NHS Scotland, and another publishing the unsocial hours percentages inverted, so the lowest-paid staff were shown the smallest enhancement when the real table gives them the largest.

It has caught our own errors too, which is the more important half. The Scottish top tax band was transcribed here using a conversion that breaks once the personal allowance tapers, putting the 48% rate £8,380 of income too early. National Insurance was worked out on the annual threshold rather than the monthly one payroll actually uses. Both were caught before anything was published — so they are in the project’s decision records rather than in the corrections log, which exists for errors that actually reached a reader. Both now have a test that would catch them again.

What it will never do

• Give financial advice. These are arithmetic estimates from published rates. Nothing here is a recommendation, and no disclaimer would change that — the design does.
• Ask for your salary and send it somewhere. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted, logged or stored — there is no server to send it to.
• Publish a figure it cannot source. The build stops if a rate is missing, inconsistent, or has not been re-verified within 120 days.

Privacy, plainly

This is a static site. Your inputs never leave your device — the calculation runs in your browser and there is nowhere for it to be sent. Fonts, styles and every script the page needs to work are served from this domain, not a third party. Prefilled links, if you share one, carry only a spinal column point, hours and a month; never a salary figure.

There is no advertising on this site, and nothing sits between a calculator's inputs and its result. Where advertising runs at all, it loads only after you have agreed to it — see cookies.

Page visits are counted, and the deeper half of it only if you agree. A cookieless counter records page loads without writing anything to your device, which is why it does not ask; Google Analytics adds the detail, sets cookies, and therefore does. The Google tag is not in the page until you say yes; a Global Privacy Control signal counts as no without your being asked; and it is never handed anything you type, because nothing you type ever leaves the browser or reaches a web address. What either is permitted to measure is deliberately narrow — the detail is on cookies.

Contact

A wrong figure, or something you could not use with a keyboard or screen reader: hello@workterms.co.uk. Accessibility problems are treated as defects, not suggestions, and a figure that disagrees with your payslip is worth reporting even if you are not sure which of us is wrong.

Anything else — a question, a request, or how your data is handled: hello@workterms.co.uk.