About Prison Take-Home Pay
Prison Take-Home Pay (prisontakehome.co.uk) is a free, independent take-home pay calculator for HMPPS prison staff in England and Wales. It turns a gross salary into an itemised breakdown of income tax, National Insurance, pension contributions and student loan repayments, so you can see what actually reaches your bank account each month.
We built it because most salary calculators are generic: they ask for an annual figure and ignore the pay framework you are actually on. This site models the real structure — the pay bands recommended by the Prison Service Pay Review Body (PSPRB), the allowances that attach to it, the pension scheme and the contractual working week — rather than treating your salary as an arbitrary number.
It is part of a network of UK take-home pay calculators that also covers NHS staff, doctors, police officers, firefighters, teachers, civil servants and everyone else.
Last updated: 26 September 2026
Who runs this site
The site is operated by Dabble Solutions Ltd, a UK-registered company (company number 17016788), trading as Take Home Network. It is run by an independent UK-based software developer — not by a union, an employer, a government body or a financial services firm. Nobody pays us to present a particular figure.
We are not financial advisers, accountants or tax agents. We are engineers who think the UK pay and tax system should be legible to the people living under it. Nothing on this site is financial advice, and every figure is an estimate — your payslip and your payroll department are always the authority on your actual pay.
The site is free to use and funded by advertising and occasional sponsorship. We do not collect, store or transmit any salary information you enter: the calculator runs entirely in your browser, and the figures you type never leave your device.
What this calculator models
- Bands 2 to 12 including the closed and legacy grades, covering Operational Support Grade through to Prison Governor.
- The seven contract variants: the 37-hour base, 37 hours with unsocial working hours, and the 38 to 41-hour patterns carrying one to four additional committed hours.
- The distinction that matters for pension: ACH is non-pensionable, while ACHP, UWH and required hours additions are pensionable.
- Location pay: Outer London (+£3,432) and Inner London (+£5,218) on top of the national band figure.
- Payment Plus at £23 an hour for additional voluntary hours, on-call payments, and alpha pension contributions.
The contract variant you are on changes both gross pay and the pensionable share of it, which is why two officers on the same band can take home noticeably different amounts. Choosing the right variant matters more here than on most pay frameworks.
Where the figures come from
Pay scales are taken from the published source for HMPPS prison staff in England and Wales — the PSPRB, with rates implemented by HMPPS — and typed in by hand against the original document rather than scraped. PSPRB pay awards normally take effect from 1 April, published in the Review Body’s annual report.
Tax, National Insurance and student loan thresholds come from HMRC and follow the April tax year, which means they move on a different cadence from the pay award. When the two are out of step, the calculator states which tax year and which pay year it is using, because a figure that silently mixes the two is worse than no figure.
The full source list, the order the calculation runs in and the known limitations are set out on the methodology page.
Corrections
If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. Corrections from people who actually receive these payslips are the most valuable feedback we get, and several have been fixed within a day of being reported. Email contact@prisontakehome.co.uk or use the contact page — a screenshot of the relevant payslip line, with personal details removed, makes a report much quicker to act on.