Where WageOra's figures come from, and how to check them yourself.
Tax and payroll
WageOra's UK tax calculations for the 2026/27 tax year are verified against these primary sources (GOV.UK, which publishes HMRC guidance, and the Scottish Government's mygov.scot service for Scottish Income Tax):
Tax-year configuration version 1.0.0, last verified 2026-08-21. See Tax-Year Updates for how and when this is reviewed.
Salary information
WageOra uses verified salary information from the Office for National Statistics where it's available, and clearly-labelled example figures where it isn't yet — see Salaries for which occupations currently have a verified figure. The sources WageOra has verified or plans to use for salary information are:
Office for National Statistics — Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), 2025 — reference period April 2025, verified 2026-08-22, open-government-licence UK Office for National Statistics ASHE 2025 bulletin, released 23 October 2025 (provisional), reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The bulletin's headline figure is UK median gross annual earnings for full-time employees of £39,039 (April 2025). ONS later corrected the occupation-level tables in this release on 19 December 2025 — see the corrected edition below, which is the edition WageOra's published occupation figures and job comparison catalogue actually use.
Office for National Statistics — Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), 2025 (provisional, corrected 19 December 2025) — reference period April 2025, verified 2026-08-25, open-government-licence Same ASHE 2025 provisional release as above, after ONS's own correction notice of 19 December 2025. An error was identified in the estimates of annual earnings for occupation 3312 (Police officers, sergeant and below) in some local areas; those specific estimates were suppressed in ASHE Tables 2, 3, 14, 15 and 20 for quality reasons in the affected regions. A revised 2025 dataset is expected in October or November 2026. WageOra's published occupation medians and coefficients of variation — covering 412 four-digit SOC 2020 occupations, of which 382 have a usable published median — are transcribed directly from this corrected edition's official workbook (Table 14.7a/14.7b). Occupation 3312 has no usable median or coefficient of variation in this corrected edition and is shown as data unavailable; the superseded pre-correction figure is never used anywhere on WageOra. No genuine ASHE figure has been assigned to Registered Nurse, which has no single verified SOC 2020 mapping for that broad title.
official Civil Service departmental pay structures, not yet verified or added
employer-published salary information, not yet verified or added
appropriately licensed vacancy and pay data, not yet verified or added
Budgeting
The UK Budget Calculator includes a 50-30-20 overview — a widely used way to compare your spending against a guide of roughly 50% needs, 30% wants and 20% future priorities. It's a heuristic people use to think about a budget, not an academically proven optimal split, and it isn't presented as suiting everyone. The sources checked for this are:
Analyzing budgets (youth financial education) — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (US) — verified 2026-08-29 WageOra's public reference for the 50-30-20 split used here (needs/wants/future). Shows the framework is used in public financial-education material, not just marketing. WageOra is not endorsed by or affiliated with the CFPB.
Mental Budgeting and Consumer Decisions — Chip Heath & Jack B. Soll, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 23(1), 1996, pp. 40–52 (DOI: 10.1086/209465) — verified 2026-08-29 Peer-reviewed evidence that people budget and track spending by category. It does not test or validate the specific 50/30/20 percentages.
How consumers budget — Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 204, 2022, pp. 69–88 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.09.025) — verified 2026-08-29 Large-scale study (US survey data plus Australian administrative data) of how consumers categorise spending. Supports category-based budgeting generally, not the specific 50/30/20 split as an optimal allocation.
The two research papers above support the general practice of budgeting by category — they don't test or validate the specific 50/30/20 percentages, and WageOra doesn't present them as if they do.
No salary or employer pay figure appears on WageOra without a traceable source and without meeting the reliability checks described in How WageOra Works.
WageOra would like to use privacy-friendly Google Analytics 4 (via Google Tag Manager) to see which pages are useful. This is separate from advertising, is never used to personalise ads, and never includes anything you type into a calculator. See the Privacy Policy for detail.
