60% effective marginal trap
A gross of £110,000 places
you inside the UK's Personal Allowance taper zone — the
statutory band between £100,000 and £125,140 where HMRC claws back £1 of
tax-free allowance for every £2 of excess income. The clawed
allowance is re-taxed at the Higher Rate, lifting the effective
marginal deduction on this slice to roughly 62%.
Inside the £100,000 → £125,140
corridor, every additional pound of gross removes 50p from your
Personal Allowance and re-taxes that 50p at the 40%
Higher Rate — on top of the 40% PAYE charge on the
pound itself, and the 2% Class 1 NI levied above
the £50,270 UEL. That stacks to the 60%+ effective rate
flagged above.
The most direct way to escape the trap is to push adjusted net
income back to £100,000 via salary sacrifice or personal
pension contributions. The
interactive calculator
quantifies the exact sacrifice figure required, and the
salary-sacrifice optimiser
models the employer-NI rebate alongside the personal-side relief.