Split a CTC package into cash, employer costs, and net take-home.
Net take-home / month
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Cash salary / yr
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Employer UIF + SDL
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PAYE / month
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Your breakdown
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The number on the offer is not the number in your account
South African employers love to quote cost to company, or CTC, because it is one tidy figure that captures everything they spend to employ you. The trouble is that the tidy figure bundles several things that never touch your bank account: the medical aid the employer pays into, the retirement fund contribution, and the levies an employer is legally required to carry. A R600,000 CTC is not a R600,000 salary, and it is certainly not R600,000 of take-home. This tool unbundles the package, separating what the employer spends from what becomes your cash, then subtracts your own PAYE and UIF to land on a realistic monthly take-home. It is for anyone weighing a job offer or trying to reconcile why their payslip looks smaller than the headline they negotiated.
The model works backwards from CTC. It treats the medical aid as an employer cost carried out of the package, then peels off the employer levies, leaving a cash salary. From there it applies retirement deductions, runs PAYE on the individual scale, and takes off your share of UIF. Every rate involved, from the income tax bands to the levy percentages, is the figure this calculator applies, and all of them are worth confirming against SARS and the Department of Employment and Labour before you treat a take-home figure as final.
Who carries which cost
Two levies sit on the employer side. UIF is split, with the employer paying one percent of remuneration up to a monthly ceiling and you paying a matching one percent. The Skills Development Levy is purely an employer cost, one percent of payroll, and only applies once the employer's total annual payroll passes R500,000, so genuinely small employers are exempt. Neither levy reduces your gross the way PAYE does; the employer UIF and SDL are simply part of the cost of having you on the books, which is why CTC includes them but your payslip does not show them as your deductions.
Unbundling a R600,000 package
Take a R600,000 CTC with a 7.5 percent retirement contribution, R2,000 a month of medical aid, an under-65 employee, and an employer above the R500,000 payroll mark so SDL applies. Using the rates this calculator applies, the package breaks down like this.
So the R600,000 headline becomes about R34,547 a month in hand, or roughly R414,560 a year. The chart shows where each piece of the annual package goes.
The structuring choice hidden inside CTC
Because CTC is fixed, anything you direct into a retirement fund comes out of the same pot, which lowers your taxable income and therefore your PAYE, but also lowers the cash you see this month. That is the central trade-off the tool makes visible. A common mistake when comparing two offers is to compare the CTC figures directly when one includes a generous medical aid and retirement contribution and the other is mostly cash. Two equal CTCs can produce very different take-home and very different long-term savings. Push for a breakdown of any offer, run both through a tool like this, and remember that the retirement slice is not lost money, it is deferred. Confirm the contribution caps and tax bands with SARS as you model.
Why is my take-home so much lower than the CTC?
Because CTC includes employer-borne items you never receive in cash, the medical aid and the UIF and SDL levies, and then your own PAYE, UIF, and retirement contribution come off the cash salary. In the example a R600,000 CTC lands at about R34,547 a month, since roughly R185,000 a year goes to those costs and taxes combined at the rates this calculator applies.
Does a higher retirement contribution always reduce my tax?
Up to a point. Retirement contributions are deductible up to 27.5 percent of income, capped at R350,000 a year as modelled here, so within that band a bigger contribution lowers your taxable income and PAYE. Beyond the cap the deduction stops, and within a fixed CTC the extra contribution simply shifts cash from your pocket into the fund without further tax saving.
What if my employer is small and SDL exempt?
If the employer's annual payroll is at or below R500,000 it does not pay the Skills Development Levy, so that one percent employer cost falls away and slightly more of the package can sit as cash salary. Select the small-employer option to see the difference; your own UIF and PAYE are unaffected because they never depended on SDL.