The gross salary for a target take-home.
Gross salary needed
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PAYE + ACC
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Per week (net)
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Your breakdown
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Worked example
Suppose you want to take home $60,000 a year after PAYE and the ACC earners levy. You cannot just add a flat percentage, because PAYE is progressive and bites harder on higher dollars. The calculator searches for the gross salary whose net pay lands exactly on $60,000. That gross turns out to be about $76,424. On that figure PAYE income tax is roughly $15,148 and the ACC levy at 1.67 percent is about $1,276.
Those two deductions add up to $16,424, and $76,424 minus $16,424 leaves the $60,000 target. That works out to about $1,154 a week in the hand. This is the number you want when an offer is quoted in take-home terms, because it tells you the headline salary to ask for. KiwiSaver and any student loan are not included here, so add those separately if they apply.
How it is calculated
Going from net to gross cannot be solved with simple division because each extra dollar of salary is taxed at a different marginal rate. The tool instead runs a binary search. It guesses a gross salary, applies the full PAYE calculation across the 10.5 to 39 percent bands plus the 1.67 percent ACC levy, and checks whether the resulting take-home is above or below your target. It narrows the range repeatedly until the net pay matches your target to the dollar. The gap between that gross and your target net is the combined PAYE and ACC bill. Because KiwiSaver and student loan deductions vary by person, they are excluded, so the gross shown is the minimum before those optional amounts come off.