Gross / Net

[secretcbeebiesfan]

Another quick question. If the contract says I will be paid £10/hour gross, is that the money I will receive???

No, gross is before tax and national insurance deductions.
Use MrAnchovy's PAYE Calculator to get a feel for what your take home pay will be. It helps to know your taxcode. MrAnchovy's PAYE Calculator

Also if you have a student loan that is deducted from your gross pay.

Gross is the amount you will be paid BEFORE reductions (eg. tax, NI, studen loan etc).
Net is the amount that goes into your bank account

deductions not reductions!

Thanks all. I won't be a student but will be a new graduate. Is that what you mean? That it will start to pay my student loan back? I thought I had to be earning a lot more in order to start paying the loan back.

Once you earn enough, then the student loan will be deducted from gross income.

Think of it as just like any other job, gross salary is what your employer pays you but what you get in your bank is that amount minus taxes and other things (pension contribution, student loan, underpayment of taxes, all sorts of things).

Okay great. Thank you cindy34 this is all a bit new to me so want to make sure I do everything properly and don't end up really poor in the long run!

The repayment threshold is about £16k on student loans so as soon as you earn above that your employer needs to make deductions from your gross wage to cover that too just like any other job. That's assuming you took a loan but most people do.

Have a play with MrAnchovy's calculator, you can tell it that you have a student loan, tell it your taxcode (or leave at default if you do not know and this is your only job), provide gross pay details, hours worked per week. It will give a very good indication of what your net pay will be. You can use fictional figures, so you could increase your gross pay to see what change that makes.

Okay - thanks. I won't be earning that amount yet. But it's good to know for future reference. So the only deductions will be NI and Tax? (the contract didn't mention pension, how do I personally go about that?)

Workplace pensions come in later, think it may be several years yet.

If you have a personal pension, then you do not need to get your employer involved at this stage as your pension provider takes care of getting back the tax. Least I think that is how it works, though I expect your pension company can tell you, if you have a pension.

Okay. Thanks again cindy I want to make sure I get everything right!

You're very sensible to educate yourself on this now. It can be confusing (and the nanny industry as a whole doesn't help).