What Are Job Situations? Modelling Multiple & Part-Year Jobs (UK 2025/26)

A Job Situation is a single employment held during a tax year. Most people have one full-year job, but real working lives are messier: you might change jobs partway through the year, or hold a second job alongside your main one. TaxPilot models each employment as its own Job Situation so the tax and National Insurance come out right.

Three common patterns

• One job, full year — add a single situation with no start or end date. This is the default.
• One job, part of the year — add one situation and set a Start and/or End date. You started in July, or left in September: pay is prorated to the days you actually worked.
• Two jobs — add two situations. For example a full-year main job plus a second job for part of the year. Each is entered separately, and one of them carries the Start/End dates.

How part-year pay is prorated

Each situation's Gross Salary is the full-time annual rate. For a full active month you receive one twelfth of that rate. In the month a job starts or ends, pay is prorated by the number of active calendar days in that month. So a £60,000 salary worked from 1 April to 30 September earns roughly £30,000, not £60,000.

Why National Insurance is calculated per job

National Insurance is legally assessed per employment. Each Job Situation gets its own monthly Primary Threshold and Upper Earnings Limit — there is no pooling across jobs. This matters when you hold two jobs at once: each job's National Insurance is worked out on its own pay, then added together. Two concurrent jobs therefore usually pay more National Insurance than a single combined salary of the same total, because the second job can't share the first job's threshold and the 2% band above the Upper Earnings Limit.

Income tax still aggregates

Unlike National Insurance, Income Tax looks at your total income across all employments. TaxPilot sums every situation's taxable pay and applies a single Personal Allowance and tax code — mirroring how HMRC reconciles your tax code across jobs. The Personal Allowance taper and the £100k trap are driven by your combined Adjusted Net Income.

Per-situation pension and holiday trading

Because Auto-Enrolment and holiday trading are arranged through a specific employer, each Job Situation has its own Auto-Enrolment pension settings and its own Holiday Trading option. Other reliefs that you arrange yourself — SIPP contributions, Gift Aid, car or cycle salary sacrifice — remain shared across your whole tax position.