Same $120K Job, Four Countries: What You Actually Take Home

Run the same $120,000 tech offer through four countries’ actual FY2026 tax tables and the take-home lands anywhere from about 63 cents to about 78 cents on the dollar. The two countries with the “high-tax” reputation, the UK and Canada, land within eight-hundredths of a percentage point of each other, 69.73% versus 69.65%. India, using its own default tax regime, comes out lowest at 62.69%, and not for the reason most people assume.

Nobody publishes this comparison end to end. There are US-only calculators, UK-only calculators, plenty of India CTC breakdowns, and a handful of cost-of-living rankings that skip the actual tax arithmetic entirely. This is a genuine four-country salary comparison, US, UK, Canada, India, run through real 2026 tax brackets rather than a flat percentage guess, and it matters more than it used to: with more roles going fully remote, see our read on where the remote tech job market actually stands in 2026, candidates increasingly negotiate offers that span borders, and the gross number on an offer letter tells you almost nothing about what actually lands in your account.

So here’s the arithmetic, in full, using the exact bracket structures behind LastRoundAI’s free Salary Calculator, so you can check my math or swap in your own numbers.

The Setup, and Where I’m Cutting Corners

Same premise across all four countries: a $120,000 USD base, or its local-currency equivalent, run through each country’s real FY2026 (or 2026/27) tax-year rules. Five assumptions, stated up front, because burying them changes the conversation later:

• Exchange rate: I used $1 = £0.75, $1 = C$1.42, $1 = ₹95, close to where things actually sat in early July 2026 (the dollar bought ₹95.22 that week, per the Federal Reserve’s own H.10 release^[1]). Rates move daily. Redo the conversion if you’re reading this months from now; the tax math underneath won’t have shifted much, but the dollar-equivalent column will.
• US: Texas, single filer. No state income tax, which keeps the number from being muddied by California or New York.
• UK: rest-of-UK bands (England, Wales, Northern Ireland), no student loan, not the separate Scottish schedule.
• Canada: Ontario, since it’s where the largest share of Canadian tech jobs actually sit.
• India: Bengaluru, Karnataka, new tax regime, the one most salaried employees default into automatically since AY 2024-25 unless they actively opt out.

One thing that surprised me while building this: India’s new regime doesn’t touch HRA or metro status at all. Only the older, opt-in regime does. So the metro HRA scenario that shapes a lot of India salary content barely moves this particular number, it matters plenty if you opt into the old regime instead, which is genuinely worth doing for some people. I break down exactly when in a companion piece on how India’s own tax regimes compare, and the short version is that it depends almost entirely on how much rent and Section 80C investment you can actually claim.

I also almost used California for the US figure instead, since a larger share of US tech salaries actually get paid there. But California’s brackets are progressive enough, nine of them, topping out at 13.3%, that most calculators, ours included, only model a representative mid-bracket approximation rather than the full table. Texas having no state income tax at all is a fact, not an approximation, so it gives a cleaner number to build the rest of the comparison on.

United States: $120,000, Texas, Single Filer

The federal standard deduction for a single filer in 2026 is $16,100, adjusted for inflation under Revenue Procedure 2025-32^[2], which leaves $103,900 in taxable income. Run that through the federal brackets: $1,240 on the first $12,400 at 10%, $4,560 on the next $38,000 at 12%, and $11,770 on the remaining $53,500 at 22%. Federal tax: $17,570.

Payroll is separate. Social Security takes 6.2% up to the $184,500 wage base for 2026, per the SSA’s own cost-of-living fact sheet^[3], so $7,440 here since $120,000 sits under the cap. Medicare takes 1.45% flat with no cap: $1,740. The extra 0.9% Additional Medicare surtax only applies above $200,000 for a single filer, so it’s zero. Texas charges nothing on wage income.

Total tax: $26,750. Take-home: $93,250 a year, $7,770.83 a month, 77.71% of the headline number. If you’re an H-1B candidate weighing a US offer against a home-country one, this is roughly the number your recruiter is implicitly asking you to compare it against.

United Kingdom: £90,000, Rest-of-UK Bands

£90,000 stays under the £100,000 threshold where the Personal Allowance starts tapering, so the full £12,570 allowance applies, leaving £77,430 taxable. The basic rate (20%) covers the first £37,700 of that, £7,540. The higher rate (40%) covers the rest, £39,730, for £15,892. Income tax: £23,432. Just over half the taxable amount falls into the 40% band.

National Insurance runs on its own schedule: 8% on earnings between the £12,570 primary threshold and the £50,270 upper earnings limit (£3,016), then 2% on everything above that up to £90,000 (£794.60). NI: £3,810.60.

Total tax: £27,242.60. Take-home: £62,757.40, or 69.73%.

Canada: C$170,400, Ontario

Federal tax runs through five brackets: 14% to $58,523, 20.5% to $117,045, and 26% on the rest up to $170,400, for $34,062.53 before credits. The federal Basic Personal Amount, $16,452 at Canada’s lowest rate of 14%, is worth a $2,303.28 credit, landing federal tax at $31,759.25.

Ontario layers its own five brackets on top, 5.05% up to 13.16%, for $14,844.63 gross, minus a provincial BPA credit of $655.94. Ontario’s BPA, at $12,989, is considerably smaller than Alberta’s $22,769, which is one reason Alberta shows up so often in “best province for take-home pay” posts. Provincial tax: $14,188.69.

Then payroll: CPP at 5.95% on earnings between the $3,500 basic exemption and the $74,600 first ceiling ($4,230.45), CPP2 at 4% on the next slice up to $85,000 ($416), and EI at 1.63% up to $68,900 ($1,123.07).

Total tax: $51,717.46. Take-home: $118,682.54, or 69.65%, just eight-hundredths of a percentage point below the UK’s number above, despite the two tax systems looking nothing alike on paper.

So Which Country Actually Keeps the Most?

The United States keeps the largest share of the headline salary, 77.71%. The UK and Canada are effectively tied around 69.7%. India’s new regime keeps the smallest share, 62.69%, and that gap is mostly explained by how India defines “salary” in the first place, not by dramatically higher tax rates.

*The USD-equivalent column uses the same flat exchange rate stated above. It is not a cost-of-living or purchasing-power adjustment, and it shouldn’t be read as one. More on that below.

Why the Gap Exists (It’s Barely About Tax Rates)

Three structural differences do almost all of the work here, and none of them is “this country just taxes people more.”

The first is how much income each system shields before taxing anything. The US standard deduction, $16,100, protects about 13% of a $120,000 salary before a single federal dollar is taxed. India’s new-regime standard deduction is ₹75,000, which sounds substantial until you convert it, about $789 at the rate used here, protecting well under 1% of an equivalent income. The UK’s Personal Allowance, £12,570, sits in between at roughly 14% of £90,000. A bigger shield at the bottom matters more, proportionally, the higher the income climbs above it, and the US and UK shields both scale closer to the actual salary level than India’s does.

The second is how each country stacks its payroll taxes. The US charges a flat 7.65% combined (Social Security plus Medicare) that barely changes as income rises, since $120,000 sits under the Social Security cap. UK National Insurance actually drops from 8% to 2% once earnings cross the upper limit, a rate cut, not a rate hike, as income grows. Canada stacks three separate payroll charges, CPP, CPP2, and EI, each with its own ceiling. None of these structures, on their own, explains why India lands lowest.

The third does, and it isn’t a tax rate at all. India’s CTC, the number on the offer letter, includes the employer’s Provident Fund contribution, ₹6,84,000 in this example, 6% of the whole package, money the employee never sees in a paycheck and won’t touch until retirement. The US, UK, and Canada all carry their own employer-side payroll costs too (an employer FICA match, employer NI, an employer CPP/EI match), but none of them fold that employer-side cost into the figure recruiters actually quote as “salary.” Recompute India’s take-home against gross salary instead of CTC, the number that shows up on a real payslip (₹1,07,16,000 here), and it jumps from 62.69% to 66.69%. Same paycheck. Different denominator.

I think that’s a mildly misleading way to advertise a job, honestly, and more Indian offer letters should show gross-after-PF right next to CTC by default, instead of leaving candidates to work it out three PDF pages into the appointment letter.

I don’t know how far any of this generalizes past tech salaries specifically. PF structuring, HRA norms, and professional tax rates vary enough by state and industry that Bengaluru’s numbers won’t map cleanly onto a manufacturing job in Pune, and a $120,000-equivalent salary sits in a genuinely different bracket position than a $60,000 one would.

What This Comparison Isn’t

Everything above is gross-to-net only: what a tax authority takes, what’s left. It is not adjusted for cost of living, and a higher take-home percentage does not mean more purchasing power. As the ILO’s statistics office puts it, exchange-rate comparisons reflect currency trading, not what things actually cost locally, and the gap between the two can be large^[4]. $93,250 a year in Austin and ₹71,46,408 a year in Bengaluru are not equivalent lifestyles just because one number is a bigger slice of its own headline salary.

Building a real cost-of-living index across four cities, correctly, needs rent data, grocery baskets, and healthcare assumptions that change by neighborhood, not just by country. That’s out of scope here, on purpose. I’d rather tell you plainly what this post doesn’t cover than fake a number for it.

Every figure above traces back to the same tax tables running inside LastRound AI’s free Salary Calculator, and as far as I can tell it’s still the only free tool computing real take-home for the US, UK, Canada, and India side by side, using each country’s actual official rules instead of a flat estimate. Plug in your own state, province, filing status, or regime and get your own answer instead of borrowing mine. At $120,000, the country you pick changes your take-home by roughly fifteen percentage points, and that’s before anyone mentions rent.

The candidate mix we actually see

Our own numbers, for what a small sample is worth. Across 1,393 interview sessions configured on LastRound between January 2025 and July 2026, 447 came from candidates with no professional experience yet and 475 from the 3 to 5 year band. Early-career candidates are heavily represented, and they are the group for whom a cross-country salary comparison changes decisions most.

Frequently asked questions

Is a US salary actually better after cost of living?

Often, but much less dramatically than the raw numbers suggest. Healthcare, housing and tax treatment absorb a large share of the difference, and the gap narrows further outside the major tech hubs.

Do remote roles pay the local rate or the company’s rate?

It varies by company and is worth asking early. Some pay a single global band, many apply a location factor, and that single policy difference can outweigh the headline salary.

Which market has the strongest currency-adjusted growth?

India has seen the fastest percentage growth in senior tech pay, from a much lower base. Absolute figures still favour the US at every level.

Should I optimise for salary or for career progression?

Early on, progression usually compounds faster than a pay difference. The exception is where a currency or visa situation makes a specific move hard to reverse later.