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PRSInethome

Frequently asked questions

Straight answers on take-home pay in Ireland: what comes out of your salary, why credits are not the same thing as a tax-free allowance, why USC can jump on a small raise, why PRSI moves from week to week, and what the marginal rate on a pay rise really is. Figures are computed by the same engine the calculator uses.

Questions people actually ask

What actually comes out of my salary in Ireland?
Three separate charges, plus anything you have chosen to pay into a pension. Income tax is charged at 20% on income up to your standard rate cut-off point and 40% on the balance, and your annual tax credits are then subtracted from that charge. USC is a second charge with its own bands, worked out on your gross income. PRSI is a third, worked out on your weekly earnings. Your employer collects all three through PAYE before the money reaches you, and what is left is your take-home pay.
Why is there no tax-free allowance in Ireland?
Because Ireland gives the relief as credits instead, and gives it at the end rather than the start. Income is taxed from the very first euro at 20% up to your cut-off point, and only then are your annual credits subtracted from the tax that was calculated. A single PAYE employee typically holds €4,000 between the personal and employee credits, which is why a low income can end up paying no income tax at all despite there being no tax-free band. The tax-free effect is real — it is just produced by subtraction from the tax rather than from the income.
What is the difference between a tax credit and a tax band?
A band decides the RATE you pay: income inside your standard rate cut-off point is charged at 20%, income above it at 40%. A credit is a flat amount taken off the tax after that calculation is done. So the band changes how the tax is computed, and the credit changes how much of it you actually hand over. The practical consequence is that a credit is worth exactly the same to a standard-rate and a higher-rate taxpayer, whereas an allowance — the mechanism most other countries use — would be worth more to the higher-rate one. Credits are also non-refundable: they can bring your tax to nil, but the unused part is not paid out and does not carry into another tax year.
Why did my USC jump when I got a small raise?
Because the USC exemption is a cliff, not a tax-free slice. At or below €13,000 of total income you pay no USC at all. One euro above it, USC applies to your whole income from the first euro — not just to the amount above the limit. Running that single euro through this site's engine: at the limit the charge is €0.00, and one euro above it the charge is €79.84. That is a step of €79.84 for a euro of extra income. If your pay is near the limit and your hours vary, this is the one number worth checking before agreeing to extra work.
Why is my PRSI different from one week to the next?
Because PRSI is assessed on each pay period's earnings, not cumulatively over the year. Your weekly pay decides your subclass in that week, and a week that lands in a different subclass is charged differently — no averaging, no catching up later. Two things move the result near the bottom of the scale: nothing at all is charged at or below €352.00 a week, and just above that a tapered credit of up to €12.00 a week reduces the charge, shrinking as earnings rise until it disappears. So a quiet week, a busy week and a bonus week can each carry a genuinely different PRSI charge even though your annual pay is the same.
Why do people say you lose more than half of a pay rise?
Because of the combined marginal rate — the cost of the next euro you earn, once the higher rate of income tax, the top USC rate and employee PRSI are added together. Nobody publishes it as a single official rate; it is the sum of three separate charges, which is exactly why the headline percentage that circulates is somebody's arithmetic rather than a quoted figure. This site's engine computes it instead: a single employee on €85,000 a year has a combined marginal rate of 52.35%, while the effective rate across the whole salary is 32.51%. The gap between those two numbers is the point. The marginal rate tells you what a raise is worth; the effective rate tells you what the job is worth; confusing them is how people talk themselves out of overtime.
Does my pension contribution reduce USC and PRSI too?
No. A tax-relieved contribution to an occupational scheme or PRSA reduces your income-tax base — but USC is charged on gross income with no relief for employee pension contributions, and PRSI is charged on reckonable pay with no relief for private-sector employee contributions either. So the saving is real but smaller than a single "marginal rate" figure suggests: you save income tax at your marginal rate, and nothing on the other two charges. Revenue's age-related percentage limits on how much contribution can be relieved are not modelled by this calculator, so a very large contribution here will be relieved in full when in reality it might not be.
Does auto-enrolment get tax relief?
No — and that is a deliberate design, not an oversight. Instead of tax relief on your contribution, the State pays a top-up into your pot alongside your employer's contribution. The consequence for your payslip is that an auto-enrolment contribution of 1.5% of gross pay does not reduce your income-tax, USC or PRSI base at all: it comes off your pay after all three charges have been worked out. Contributions are not levied on gross pay above €80,000. Automatic enrolment applies within an age band and above an earnings floor, with an opt-in available outside them, and it does not apply to anyone already covered by a workplace pension. That "comes out of pay after the charges" description is our reading of the published mechanism rather than a sentence the scheme's own documentation uses, and we flag it as such.
Is this the same as what my payslip shows?
Not necessarily, and the gap is usually explainable. This calculator computes a full-year position on the cumulative basis — the position you end the year in — and divides it back to the period you chose. Real payroll can differ: a week-1 or month-1 basis, or an emergency basis while Revenue has no up-to-date instruction for your employer, both charge differently, and neither is modelled here. PRSI is legally charged per pay period, so an uneven month genuinely produces a different charge from an even one. And your actual credits and cut-off point come from the payroll notification Revenue issues for you, which may include credits this calculator does not model.
Is employer PRSI taken out of my pay?
No. Employer PRSI is a cost your employer carries on top of your wage, and it never appears as a deduction from your take-home. It is shown here because it is worth seeing: above €552.00 of weekly pay the higher employer rate applies to the whole week's pay rather than to the excess, so the true cost of employing someone can step up sharply at a threshold that never appears on their own payslip.
Are the numbers on this site correct?
Each value follows a primary source — Revenue, the Irish Statute Book, the Department of Social Protection — and is cited on the page that uses it. Two limits apply: if a rule changed recently it may not be reflected here yet, and none of the figures has been through our final sign-off, which is what the notice at the foot of every page says. Some points are genuinely unresolved rather than merely unsigned, and the pages say so where they arise: a mid-year PRSI rate step that is departmentally published but whose enacting clause we could not locate, an employer PRSI ceiling whose absence is inferred from the table structure, and the year the reduced USC schedule for medical card holders stops. Use it for a ballpark, and take an amount that binds you from the cited source or Revenue.

Two habits explain most of the surprises on an Irish payslip, and both are on this page. The first is that the three charges do not share a base: income tax is worked out after relieved pension contributions, USC on gross, PRSI on reckonable weekly pay. The second is that two of the reliefs work as thresholds with hard edges — the USC exemption and the employer PRSI step — while a third, the PRSI employee credit, tapers deliberately to avoid one. Once you know which is which, the arithmetic stops being surprising.

Anything not answered here is probably a boundary of the model rather than a secret: the calculator covers an Irish-resident PAYE employee on level pay, and the about page lists what it deliberately leaves out. The 2026 contribution year is also split by a mid-year PRSI rate step, which is why annual PRSI here is walked week by week rather than taken at one rate. The auto-enrolment figures follow the scheme’s first contribution phase, and the rates step up in later phases — 1.5% is the current employee share, not a permanent one.

The figures behind these answers follow Revenue, the Irish Statute Book and the Department of Social Protection, cited page by page. If a rule changed recently it may not be reflected here yet — for an official amount, check the cited source or ask Revenue.