The stealth tax calculator
The stealth taxes you never see
Your income tax arrives with a payslip. Your second-biggest tax bill arrives with no statement at all — folded into the price of fuel, a pint, a flight, a home, a car insurance policy, and almost everything on every receipt. The average UK household pays around £7,000 a year this way and never gets told.
We talk endlessly about income tax and National Insurance, because they turn up in black and white on a payslip. Indirect taxes — the ones baked into prices — are enormous, constant, and almost invisible. VAT alone raised nearly £180 billion last year, more than any other tax except income tax. You pay it every single day and it never once names itself.
Answer a few things about your life and watch the bill assemble itself.
A few things about your life. Everything computes on your device — nothing is sent anywhere.
Tax you paid this year without ever seeing a bill
£6,650
About 14.8% of your income — on top of the income tax and National Insurance you can see.
VAT is the giant nobody names: at 49.0% of your hidden-tax bill, it dwarfs the duties that get all the headlines. And it’s charged on top of most of those duties — tax on tax.
This is the most regressive part of the whole system
Indirect taxes take the same slice of a pint or a tank of fuel whoever buys it — so they weigh far heavier on people with less. The ONS finds the poorest fifth of households hand over 24.9% of their disposable income in indirect tax; the richest fifth, just 10.5%. The tax with no bill attached is the one that asks the most of the people who can least afford it.
Why it stays invisible on purpose
A tax you can see is a tax you can be angry about. A tax welded into a price is one you blame the shop for. That’s not a conspiracy — it’s just what makes indirect taxes so politically durable: nobody ever opens an envelope from HMRC for the £3,000 of VAT they paid this year, so nobody ever campaigns against it the way they would a £3,000 income-tax rise.
The one exception is the tax with a name on it — council tax — which is exactly why it’s the one people resent most, even though it’s often not the largest line here. Visibility, not size, drives the anger.
How these figures are estimated
Duties are the current published per-unit rates: fuel duty at 52.95p a litre (the rate to 31 August 2026), air passenger duty at the 2026/27 bands, alcohol and tobacco duty at the latest HMRC rates, insurance premium tax at 12%, and council tax scaled from the 2025/26England average of £2,280 at Band D. VAT is the hard one to attribute personally, so we estimate it from your spendable income using the ONS’s own finding that VAT falls as a share of income as income rises — which is why the figure is an estimate, not a precise personal number.
To keep the total honest, VAT is shown as a single line rather than split across every section — otherwise the VAT charged on top of fuel duty, alcohol duty and the rest would be counted twice. The energy-bill policy levy (£150) is illustrative and falling from April 2026. Gambling and soft-drink levies are not separately modelled. All figures are estimates for guidance, not a statement of tax due.
Kept shows the tax you can see — and the levers that shrink it.
Indirect tax is mostly beyond your control. The tax on your income and your company isn't — and that's where Kept works, finding the reliefs the code already lets you claim on your real numbers.
See your own positionSources
- Fuel duty, alcohol duty, tobacco duty, air passenger duty rates: GOV.UK / HMRC, 2026/27.
- Insurance Premium Tax (12%): GOV.UK. VAT rates and receipts: GOV.UK, OBR.
- Council tax levels set by local authorities in England 2025/26: MHCLG.
- Indirect tax by household: ONS, “Effects of taxes and benefits on household income”, FYE 2024.