Free Childcare Hours

needhelpfreecc

Hi, really hoping someone can explain clearly how the government free childcare hours work - specifically how to calculate net adjusted income as the government advice is unclear and somewhat contradictory.

We have a newborn baby who we will be looking to start in nursery in March/April 2025. 

I will likely earn in excess of 100k in the tax year but am part of a DC pension contribution scheme through work where my contributions are taken from my gross (pre tax) salary. I understand the scheme is based on net adjusted income and that therefore I would be able to deduct my pension contributions from my salary to arrive at the level of income that would be assessed. In terms of the figure I deduct, is this simply the number that appears on my payslip? Or do I have to adjust to give a “grossed up” number? If so, do I increase by a set factor of 1.25 or another number?

I don’t have any of the other complicated additional sources of income or allowable deductions that appear on the examples on the HMRC website.

Many thanks in advance!