Why these three
Because none of them come out of your agency software. It knows what you invoiced. It does not know whether the money in your client account puts you inside a scheme requirement, what your commission is worth after VAT and a referral fee, or what a negotiator costs you once employer National Insurance is added to the salary you agreed.
Each uses stated simplifications and says so. They are built to get you to the right order of magnitude quickly — enough to know whether something is worth a proper look, not enough to file anything on.
Common questions
Are these free, and is anything stored?
Free, no sign-up, and nothing is stored. They run entirely in your browser, so the figures you type never leave your device — we do not see them and neither does anyone else. There is no email gate in front of any of them, because a calculator you have to pay for with your contact details is an advert rather than a tool. If you would rather not type your own numbers in at all, the same three calculations form part of the free review and we will run them from your actual records.
How accurate is the client money check?
It is accurate about the law and deliberately cautious about your facts. The regime question is a genuine legal distinction with a clear answer, and the tool walks the same route an adviser would: do you do estate agency work, do you do lettings, and do you hold anyone else's money. Where it cannot be certain it says so rather than guessing — the seven categories of client money in the MHCLG guidance include things like maintenance floats and unprotected deposits in the window before they reach a tenancy deposit scheme, and only you know whether those are sitting in your account this month.
Where do the figures come from?
Primary sources, and they are cited in the code that does the arithmetic. VAT at 20% and the £90,000 registration threshold from the published rates. Employer National Insurance at 15% above a £5,000 secondary threshold, with the £10,500 Employment Allowance, from the 2026 to 2027 rates and thresholds for employers. The client money and audit rules from SI 2019/386, SI 2018/751 and SI 1981/1520 themselves. Every figure is listed at the top of the JavaScript file that does the arithmetic, with the instrument it came from, so you can check what a tool believes before you trust what it tells you — which is not something most calculators let you do. Where something is reasoned analysis rather than a published position, the tool says so on the page: the treatment of portal advertising and tenant referencing as recharges follows from Revenue and Customs Brief 6 of 2020, but HMRC has issued no estate-agency-specific ruling on either. If a rate changes, the calculators change with it.
Which one should I use first?
The client money check, if you only run one. The other two are about margin and cost, which matter every month but rarely become an enforcement problem. The client money question decides whether you need a scheme you may not have, whether an audit is due that nobody has mentioned, and whether a Trading Standards officer working to a £30,000 maximum would find you compliant. It takes about a minute and it is the one with a criminal offence at the bottom of it.