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A new take home pay calculator has been launched by Parasol, which provides accurate and transparent net take home pay calculations for umbrella company contractors.

The firm hopes that the new FCSA approved calculator will make it even harder for "unscrupulous service providers" working within the contracting industry to make conflicting and exaggerated claims of how much take home pay a worker can achieve via different umbrella schemes.

The Parasol net take home pay calculator does rely on expenses assumptions (which may be inflated elsewhere) to make the take home pay amount more attractive, and includes both net and gross administration fees so contractors know exactly what they are paying for the service up front; making it more difficult for service providers to entice new contractors in with misleading headline rates.

The tool also offers a full breakdown of contractor pay including tax and NI contributions, exactly as each contractor would find on their payslip.

Rob Crossland, chief executive of Parasol, said that some umbrella schemes were "pulling the wool over the eyes" of contractors about the size of deductions being made from their pay packets.

The new FCSA calculator should make the whole net pay calculation completely transparent.

Crossland said that statements such as 'take home 90 per cent of your income', which is a typical slogan created by "service providers at the bottom end of the market" were damaging the umbrella industry's reputation as a whole.

You can access the calculator via the Parasol site.