£10 an hour is how much a year in the UK? Gross salary, tax, National Insurance, your 2026/27 take-home, and why £10 is below minimum wage for most workers.
If a job is offering £10 an hour, or you are already on it and doing the sums, you probably want two things: to know what £10 an hour is how much a year, and to check whether that rate is even allowed in 2026. Both answers matter, and the second one might surprise you.
Here is the full breakdown, with real 2026/27 numbers, plus the minimum-wage rules that decide whether £10 an hour is legal for you at all.
Your gross annual pay is your hourly rate times your weekly hours times 52 weeks. Because “full time” varies by employer, £10 an hour lands on different totals depending on your contract:
So £10 an hour annual salary is somewhere between about £18,200 and £20,800 for a full-time week, and much less if you work part time. I will use the 37.5-hour week (£19,500) as the main worked example below.
Before we get to tax, the more urgent point is whether an employer can legally pay you £10 an hour in the first place.
For a lot of workers, £10 an hour is now below the law. The UK minimum wage rose on 1 April 2026, and the rates are banded by age:
Line £10 up against that and the picture is clear. If you are 21 or over, £10 an hour is £2.71 below your legal minimum. If you are 18 to 20, it is 85p below yours. The only workers £10 an hour is legal for are 16 and 17 year olds and apprentices, whose floor is £8.00, so for them £10 is actually above the minimum.
Here is what I would check first. If you are 18 or over, not an apprentice, and being paid £10 an hour for normal work, your employer is likely underpaying you. You are owed at least the rate for your age band, and you can report underpayment to HMRC, which enforces the minimum wage. The apprentice rate only applies for the first year of an apprenticeship, or while you are under 19, so a second-year apprentice aged 19 or over jumps to their normal age-band rate.
The honest takeaway: £10 an hour in 2026 is mostly a young-worker or apprentice rate. If that is not you, treat the offer as a red flag and ask why it is below the legal floor.
If you are 21 or over and stuck on £10 an hour instead of the £12.71 you are owed, the shortfall adds up fast. The gap is £2.71 an hour. On a 37.5-hour week that is £2.71 × 37.5 × 52 = £5,284.50 a year in gross pay you are missing. On a 40-hour week the gap widens to about £5,637 a year.
That is not a rounding error, it is a serious sum, and minimum-wage law lets HMRC recover underpayment going back up to six years. For an 18 to 20 year old on £10 against the £10.85 rate, the gap is 85p an hour, or roughly £1,658 a year on a 37.5-hour week. Either way, it is worth raising with your employer in writing first, then with HMRC if it is not put right.
For the workers £10 an hour does apply to, the good news is that tax and National Insurance take a smaller bite than at higher rates, because a chunk of your pay is protected by the personal allowance.
On the standard tax code 1257L for 2026/27:
Gross salary: £19,500
Take-home: £19,500 − £1,940.40 = £17,559.60 a year.
That is about £1,463 a month, or roughly £338 a week, before any pension or student loan.
Gross salary: £20,800
Take-home: £20,800 − £2,304.40 = £18,495.60 a year, or about £1,541 a month.
If you work part time on £10 an hour and your total earnings stay under £12,570 for the year, something useful happens: you pay no income tax and no National Insurance. Both kick in only above £12,570.
So a 20-hour week at £10 an hour, giving £10,400 a year, is fully tax-free. Your take-home is the whole £10,400, about £867 a month. This is common for students, apprentices on reduced hours, or anyone combining a couple of small jobs, though be careful, because a second job can be taxed on a BR code that ignores the allowance you have already used.
Setting the legal question aside, £10 an hour is at the bottom of the UK pay range. It sits below the National Living Wage of £12.71, so for anyone 21 and over it is not just below-average, it is below the legal minimum. Even for an 18 to 20 year old, £10 is under their £10.85 rate.
Where £10 an hour is genuinely reasonable is as an apprentice or under-18 rate, where the legal floor is £8.00. In that context, £10 an hour is a fair bit above the minimum and a decent starting point, especially if the role comes with training or a clear path to a higher band.
For a rough sense of scale, a full-time worker on £10 an hour takes home around £17,560 a year. Move up to £12 an hour and that rises to roughly £19,700, and our £12 an hour guide walks through the workings. Even £11.44 an hour, the old 2024 living wage, now beats £10 comfortably, as the £11.44 an hour breakdown shows.
The tax side barely moved. For 2026/27 the personal allowance is still £12,570, the basic rate is still 20%, and National Insurance is still 8% in the main band. These have been frozen since 2021.
What did change is the wage floor. The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 from 1 April 2026, up from £12.21, and the 18 to 20 rate rose to £10.85, up from £10.00. That last jump matters for anyone on £10 an hour: a rate that was exactly the legal minimum for 18 to 20 year olds in 2025 is now below it in 2026. If your pay did not rise in April, it may quietly have slipped under the law.
Because the tax thresholds stay frozen while the minimum wage climbs, the tax-free personal allowance covers less of a full-time minimum-wage salary each year. For now, a full-time £10 an hour worker still earns most of their money inside the allowance, so their tax bill stays modest.
If you want your exact £10 an hour take-home for your hours, age and tax code, the NetPay app works it out for you, including National Insurance, student loan and pension. Free to download.
See your real take-home pay in seconds
NetPay does this maths for every shift, invoice and payslip, automatically.
Download the app now
On a 37.5-hour week, £10 an hour is £19,500 a year gross. On a 40-hour week it's £20,800, and on a 35-hour week it's £18,200. Multiply your contracted weekly hours by £10 and then by 52 to get your own figure.
At £10 an hour on a 37.5-hour week (£19,500 a year) with the standard 1257L tax code, you take home about £17,560 a year, or roughly £1,463 a month, after income tax and National Insurance. Part-time hours that keep you under £12,570 a year pay no tax or National Insurance at all.
For most workers, no. From April 2026 the minimum is £12.71 an hour for age 21 and over, and £10.85 for ages 18 to 20. £10 an hour is only legal for 16 and 17 year olds or apprentices, whose minimum is £8.00. If you are 18 or over and not an apprentice, £10 an hour is below what you are legally owed.
£10 an hour is at the low end of the UK pay range and sits below the National Living Wage, so for most adults it is not good pay and may not even be legal. It is most likely to appear as an apprentice or under-18 rate, where it can be above the relevant legal minimum.
Want to see your actual take-home pay?
NetPay UK works out your real net pay after tax, NI, pension and salary sacrifice, for hourly, shift and variable-income workers. Free to download.
Download the app now
A note on financial advice: NetPay UK calculates take-home pay based on official HMRC tax rules. This article reflects rules in force at the time of publication (16 July 2026). Tax rules change. For complex situations, consult a qualified UK accountant or visit gov.uk/income-tax.
