Job Offer Comparison Calculator

Base salary is the number everyone anchors on and it is usually the largest single component, but it is rarely the whole difference. Bonus, equity, the employer retirement match, what your benefits cost you, and how much time off you get can easily add up to twenty percent of a package in either direction.

The employer retirement match is the most commonly overlooked item, because it does not appear in your take home pay. A six percent match on a 70,000 salary is 4,200 a year of real money you would otherwise have to save yourself, and the difference between a six percent match and none is worth more than most of the salary gaps people agonise over.

Benefits cut the other way. Health cover, dental, and similar deductions vary enormously between employers, and a lower salary with fully covered family health insurance frequently beats a higher one where you pay several thousand a year for the same thing. Ask for the actual employee contribution figures before you decide, since this is the item most often left vague until the paperwork arrives.

Time off is not added to your pay, because you do not receive extra money for it. What it changes is how many days you have to work to earn the same package. Twenty five days of leave against fifteen means ten fewer working days for the same salary, which is a real and measurable increase in what each working day is worth.

That is why this calculator shows a value per working day. It is the cleanest way to compare a higher paying job with less leave against a lower paying job with more, and it avoids double counting time off as if it were cash.

Ten extra days of leave is two working weeks. On a 70,000 package that is roughly 2,700 of value, and unlike a bonus it arrives every year, is not taxed as income, and cannot be quietly withdrawn in a bad quarter.

A forty minute commute each way, three days a week, is about four hours a week and roughly 170 hours a year. That is more than four working weeks of your life, unpaid, spent travelling. It does not appear on any offer letter and it is frequently the single biggest difference between two otherwise similar jobs.

The money is easier to see but still gets missed. Fuel, parking or a transit pass at twelve a day, three days a week, is around 1,700 a year of post tax money, which is roughly 2,300 of pre tax salary you would need to be paid to break even.

This calculator counts both. Commuting cost is deducted from the package, and commuting hours appear in the hourly figure rather than the salary, because they are hours you spend on the job without being paid for them. If one offer is remote or hybrid and the other is not, this is usually where the comparison is decided.

Equity is the component people most often overvalue. For a public company with liquid shares, counting the annual vesting value at the current price is reasonable, though the price will move and your grant may be back weighted so the early years are worth less than the headline. For a private company, the honest answer is that the number in your offer letter is the company describing its own hopes.

A practical approach is to count public company equity at close to face value, count private company equity at a heavy discount, and then ask yourself whether the offer still wins if the equity turns out to be worth nothing. If it does, take it with a clear head. If it only wins because of the equity, you are making a bet rather than comparing salaries, and it is worth being explicit about that with yourself.

Whatever you decide, ask the specific questions before you accept: the strike price, the vesting schedule and cliff, the current preferred valuation, what happens to unvested shares if you leave, and how long you have to exercise after leaving. That last one has cost a great many people their entire equity.

A twenty percent raise into a city that is thirty percent more expensive is a pay cut, and it is one of the most common ways people lose money by accepting a better sounding job. Enter a cost of living index for each offer and the comparison adjusts both to the same real terms basis.

Our cost of living calculator gives you that index for a long list of cities, using the United States average as 100. Housing drives most of the difference between places, so if you rent in a city centre the gap will feel larger than the index implies, and if you own with a fixed mortgage, smaller.

Also check the tax difference, which this calculator does not model. Between countries, and between states or regions with different income tax, the same gross salary can differ by several thousand in take home pay, and it is worth getting a jurisdiction specific net pay estimate for both before you commit.

The numbers settle the financial question, and the financial question is usually not the one that determines whether the next two years go well. Who you report to matters more than most salary gaps, because a good manager is the strongest predictor of whether you learn anything and whether you are still there in eighteen months.

Then there is what the role does for the job after this one. A slightly lower paying role with genuine ownership, a growing team and a title that opens doors is frequently worth more over five years than the higher offer that leaves you doing the same thing you do now. Stability matters too: a well funded, profitable employer with a boring product is worth a real discount against an exciting one with eight months of runway.

A reasonable rule is that if the numbers are within about five percent of each other, treat them as equal and decide on the manager, the work and the direction. If the gap is larger than that, be honest with yourself about what you are giving up to take the smaller one, and whether the difference is genuinely worth it.

This free job offer comparison calculator online exists to make that five percent question answerable in two minutes, so you can spend your thinking on everything it cannot measure.