Author
Rakesh Choudhary
One person, named on every page, with the limits of that stated rather than implied.
Who
Rakesh Choudhary built and maintains Work Terms. He holds a PhD in Sociology and works inside a government pay system — the Indian Central Government — where the daily material is the same class of document this site is built on: national pay circulars, incremental scales, allowance tables, and the rules that decide which month an award actually lands in pay.
He also founded and edits a public-sector pay publication in that jurisdiction, which is where the habits on this site come from: transcribe the document, show the working, log the correction.
What that qualifies him to do — and what it does not
The transferable skill is reading pay instruments. A pay spine, a band table, an unsocial hours percentage and a backpay window behave the same way whoever publishes them, and the failure modes are identical everywhere: a rate derived from a percentage instead of imported, one nation’s table read onto another’s page, a provisional figure presented as final.
What it does not confer is any UK-specific standing, so this is stated plainly rather than left for a reader to assume. He is not employed by the NHS, a local authority, the Local Government Association, the National Joint Council, a trade union or any employer. He holds no UK legal, HR, payroll or financial qualification, is not a financial adviser, and nothing on this site is advice — see the editorial policy.
He is not a doctor of medicine, and the doctorate is not in a subject that would make him an authority on UK employment terms. It appears here as a fact about him, not as a credential for the subject — which is why the byline on every page reads Rakesh Choudhary and not a title.
Why the method is the credential
On anything UK-specific the authority is the document, not the author, and the site is built so you never have to take the author’s word for a number:
- Every figure is transcribed from a named, dated document — never calculated by applying a percentage to last year, which is how rounding errors get in.
- Source PDFs are pinned by file hash, so a silent republication is detectable.
- The working is shown line by line, with the assumptions — tax year, nation, working week, what is excluded — stated beside it.
- Where a figure cannot be shown honestly it is not shown. A missing pension table returns unavailable and says why, because a take-home figure missing a deduction overstates it by roughly 6–10%.
- Corrections are public and logged, not quietly edited away.
That is the argument for trusting a page here, and it is checkable without trusting anyone: read the methodology, then check a figure against the sources.
What he writes here
Two subjects and no others: NHS Agenda for Change and NJC local government pay and conditions. The site deepens those two rather than widening, so there is no general UK money content here and there will not be.
Elsewhere
Contact
A wrong figure, or a page you could not use with a keyboard or screen reader: hello@workterms.co.uk. A figure that disagrees with your payslip is worth reporting even if you are not sure which of us is wrong.
Anything else: hello@workterms.co.uk.