How we make money
Free calculators have to be paid for somehow. This page says exactly how — and the firewalls that keep money away from the estimates.
The model
- Referral fees. Where a genuinely relevant partner product exists (for example, fee-free accounting software for CIS subcontractors), we may show a clearly labelled partner link and earn a referral fee if you choose it. You pay nothing extra.
- Affiliate links. Always marked, never disguised as HMRC routes. The official free GOV.UK link is always shown first and most prominently — that order never changes for commercial reasons.
- Advertising. If display ads are ever enabled they will be labelled, will not appear inside calculator result panels, and will be covered by the Marketing category in our consent manager.
What we never do
- Take a percentage of your refund — or any fee connected to a refund at all.
- Rank, recommend or soften a result because a partner asked.
- Sell or share the inputs you type into a calculator (they never reach our servers in the first place).
- Pretend a partner link is an official route. GOV.UK links are marked and always exit to gov.uk.
The firewall in practice
Calculator code and commercial placements live in separate parts of the product. Engine functions are pure — they cannot even see analytics, let alone referral configuration. Editorial sign-off for any partner placement requires that the free route remains visually dominant. If a placement would compromise that, the placement dies.
Questions
If you ever think a commercial relationship has leaked into a result or a recommendation, tell us via the contact page — that is exactly the kind of report our corrections process exists for.