About GP Finance Tools

The rules that decide what a GP actually earns and retires on are spread across scheme regulations, NHSBSA factsheets, HMRC thresholds and PCSE submission processes. None of it is secret. All of it is tedious, and most of it changes every April.

The result is that decisions worth tens of thousands of pounds — whether to buy out an early retirement reduction, whether a locum rate really beats a salaried post, whether an extra session triggers an annual allowance charge — get made on hearsay from the coffee room. These calculators are the workings I wanted for those decisions, made reusable.

Every figure on this site is traced to a primary source. Where a secondary source disagrees with the official one, the official one wins and the discrepancy gets noted in the guide rather than quietly resolved.

• NHSBSA — Member guides and scheme factsheets — contribution tiers, accrual, ERRBO factors, and the locum and Type 2 forms.
• HMRC — Income tax and National Insurance thresholds, the annual allowance and the taper.
• ONS — The September CPI figure that sets the following April's CARE revaluation.
• NHS Employers and the BMA — Pay circulars, salaried GP model terms, and sessional pay guidance.

The calculators are built from worked models and tested against them before release, so the tool and the spreadsheet behind it agree to the pound. Where a calculation depends on official factor tables — ERRBO costs, for instance — the published tables are used directly rather than approximated.

Every guide carries a visible review date and the version of the document it was checked against. If a date looks stale, treat the page with suspicion and tell me — that is what the date is for.

This is not financial advice, and I am not a regulated financial adviser. Nothing here is a personal recommendation, because a calculator cannot know your circumstances, your other pensions, your health, or what you want your life to look like at 60.

What these tools can do is get you to a regulated adviser or a specialist medical accountant already understanding your own numbers, which tends to make that conversation shorter, cheaper and better. For decisions of any size, go and have it.

It isn’t, really. There are no adverts, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, and no commission from advisers, accountants or product providers. Nobody pays to appear here and nobody can pay to change what a calculator says.

There is a “buy me a coffee” link on the tools for anyone who wants to chip in towards the hosting. That is the whole business model, and it is deliberate: the moment a referral fee is involved, you have to start wondering why a tool recommends what it recommends.

The figures cover the NHS Pension Scheme in England and Wales. Scotland (SPPA) and Northern Ireland (HSC) run separate schemes with different tiers and administration, so the pension outputs will not be right for you there, even where the tax side is.

Tax figures are for the current UK tax year as stated on each tool. Scottish income tax bands differ and are not yet modelled.

Please tell me. Corrections to a calculation are the most useful message I can get, and they get fixed and re-dated rather than argued with. If you can point at the factsheet or the paragraph in the regulations, better still.