Job Offer Comparison Calculator

Salary isn't the number you might compare

Comparing two offers on gross salary alone omits a large part of what each one pays. Total compensation spans base salary, employer pension contributions, bonuses at their expected value rather than their maximum, share grants and their vesting schedule, medical and protection cover, training budgets, flexible working, and the cost of getting to the office.

This calculator handles three of those directly: base salary, annual bonus and a benefits figure. On the loaded inputs, Offer 1 totals 125,000 and Offer 2 totals 127,000, so Offer 2 is ahead by 2,000 despite the sections below listing plenty of ways that could reverse.

The row beside those totals is the one most people skip. It shows what share of each package is base salary: 80.00% for Offer 1 against 86.61% for Offer 2. The higher that share, the more of the package is contractual and predictable; the lower it is, the more depends on a bonus paying out or a benefit being used. Two offers can reach the same total with very different amounts of certainty behind them.

Pension contributions: an additional employer-funded contribution

An employer contributing 8% is paying more than one contributing 3%. On a 60,000 salary the gap is 3,000 a year, and that 3,000 compounds inside a pension for the rest of a career: at 5% over 25 years it accumulates to roughly 143,000, and at 7% over 30 years closer to 283,000.

The arithmetic on a single year is worth doing carefully, because the intuition here is easy to get wrong. A 60,000 salary with a 10% employer contribution totals 66,000. A 65,000 salary with 3% totals 66,950. The higher-salary offer is ahead, not behind. For the 60,000 job to match it, the contribution would need to reach about 11.6%. A large match difference can dominate a comparison, but only once it is large enough, and five percentage points on a lower base is not.

Bonuses: the expected value calculation

Offer letters quote bonus figures at face value, and the useful number is the expected value: the bonus size multiplied by the probability of achieving it. A 10,000 target bonus at a company where 60% of staff hit target has an expected value of 6,000, not 10,000. An “up to 15,000” bonus where few reach the ceiling is worth considerably less than its headline.

Applying that to the loaded figures shows the effect directly. Discounting Offer 1’s 10,000 bonus to a 6,000 expected value moves the comparison from a 2,000 gap to a 6,000 gap, tripling it. Bonus history, or a direct question about the average payout percentage last year, produces a more usable figure than the number in the letter.

Stock and RSU vesting schedules

Share grants carry both a valuation problem and a retention problem, and they differ sharply by company stage. Pre-IPO equity has a theoretical value and a real probability of ending at zero. Public-company restricted stock vesting a quarter each year depends on the share price and on staying long enough to receive it. Cliff vesting, where everything lands at the end, concentrates that risk further.

A rough valuation multiplies the current share price by the number of shares and then discounts for the chance of leaving before the grant fully vests. Applied to a 40,000 grant over four years, a public-company package might reasonably be entered somewhere below its face value, and a private-company grant at a much steeper discount again. Where one offer includes equity and the other does not, entering the face value on one side is what makes the comparison unfair.

Commute cost: the invisible salary cut

A job that requires travel costs more than one that does not, at the same salary. A 45-minute journey each way is 1.5 hours a day, or 390 hours a year across 260 working days, plus the fare or fuel. That is the equivalent of roughly ten additional working weeks a year given without pay.

Expressed per hour, a 60,000 salary across a 2,080-hour year is about 28.85. Adding 390 commuting hours takes the same pay across 2,470 hours to about 24.29, roughly 16% lower, and travel costs of a few thousand a year push the reduction toward 20 to 25%. Eurostat publishes average actual working hours by country, which is the right denominator for that calculation where a full-time week is not 40 hours. Where one offer is remote and the other is not, that difference belongs in the benefits figure rather than being left out of the arithmetic.

Flexible working: the non-financial compensation

Compressed hours, flexible start times, a four-day week and genuinely usable leave are all forms of compensation, and none of them appears in a total-compensation figure. A four-day arrangement at 80% of salary shows in this calculator as a 20% pay cut, which is arithmetically true and tells only part of the story.

What the arrangement is worth is personal rather than general: it depends on what the reclaimed time would be used for, and on whether reduced hours change progression at that employer. The calculator can represent it only by placing a value on it in the benefits field, which makes the valuation explicit rather than hidden.

The step-up effect: what the offer implies about future pay

A starting salary anchors every subsequent rise, so the growth rate attached to an offer can matter as much as its opening figure. Company A at 60,000 with 4% annual rises reaches about 88,800 after ten years. Company B at 65,000 with 3% reaches about 87,400, essentially the same place from a higher start. Company C at 60,000 with 6% reaches about 107,500, well ahead of both.

That last comparison is the point: a five thousand difference at the start is worth less than a two percentage point difference in the rate. Rise patterns are harder to research than starting salaries, but recruiter conversations and published pay scales give some indication, and the difference compounds for as long as someone stays.

Private medical and protection benefits

Where healthcare is publicly funded, private medical cover adds convenience rather than access, and its cash-equivalent value is correspondingly lower. Where it is privately funded, the same cover can be the single largest item in a benefits package. That difference by country is why the calculator takes a benefits figure rather than a checklist.

Protection benefits are easier to value consistently. Death-in-service cover at a multiple of salary, critical illness cover and income protection can each be priced against what an equivalent individual policy would cost, and together they often come to a meaningful annual figure for someone who would otherwise have bought them. Someone who would not have bought them should value them lower.

Training and career investment

Training budgets differ from other benefits in one respect: they compound into future earnings rather than being consumed in the year they are given. A budget used on a qualification or a skill that raises the next salary negotiation is worth more than its face value; one that goes unused is worth nothing.

The practical question is whether the budget is genuinely accessible, since a stated allowance and an approved one are different things. Employers with established development structures tend to deliver more of the stated figure than those where the budget exists on paper.

Geography and cost of living

Cost of living can reverse a comparison outright. Housing is usually the largest divergence between locations and can differ by a substantial multiple, while transport, food and services typically vary by a smaller margin. A higher headline offer in a more expensive location can leave less disposable income than a lower offer elsewhere.

The rough test is to work out what salary in the more expensive location would leave the same amount after housing and everyday costs, then compare the offer against that figure rather than against the other salary. This calculator makes no cost-of-living adjustment at all, so for offers in different locations it answers only half the question.

The intangibles that decide it

Once the arithmetic is done, offers are frequently separated by things it cannot measure: the manager, the team, what the role actually involves day to day, and whether the growth assumptions above are plausible at that employer. These are not soft considerations. They predict how long someone stays, which is what determines whether a ten-year salary trajectory or a four-year vesting schedule ever materialises.

What this calculator shows

The calculator aggregates base salary, annual bonus and a benefits figure into a total for each offer, reports the difference, and shows what share of each total is base salary. It does not probability-weight bonuses, discount equity for vesting risk, adjust for cost of living, or value anything non-financial.

Everything else on this page describes work the reader has to do before entering the numbers: discounting a bonus to its expected value, pricing benefits at what replacing them would cost, and adding or subtracting the commute. Eurostat measures employer non-wage costs at 24.8% of total labour cost across the European Union in 2025, ranging from 4.8% in Romania to 32.3% in France, which is a useful sense check on any benefits figure entered here. The output is a compensation baseline, and it is only as good as the figures put into it.