Job Offer Comparison Calculator

Base salary is the number everyone compares and the wrong one to compare alone

Two offers with identical base salaries can differ by tens of thousands of dollars a year in actual value once retirement match, health insurance, bonus structure and commute cost are counted — and two offers with visibly different base salaries can land close to equal, or even flip which one is actually worth more, once the full picture is built out. This calculator exists because comparing offer letters by their headline number alone is the single most common mistake people make in a job change, and it’s an easy mistake to make precisely because base salary is the number printed in the largest font on the page.

The components that quietly move the real number

401(k) or retirement match is effectively guaranteed extra compensation if you contribute enough to capture it — a 4% match on a $100,000 salary is $4,000 a year in money you’d otherwise leave on the table, every year, which compounds meaningfully over a career.

Health insurance value is the benefit people most consistently underweight, because premiums are usually shown as “your cost” rather than total plan cost — the employer’s contribution toward a family PPO plan can run well into five figures annually and varies substantially between employers and plan tiers. Ask specifically for the employer’s contribution amount rather than assuming similar plans cost similarly.

Commute cost is a real, recurring cost that reduces an offer’s actual value the same way a lower salary would, whether it’s gas, transit fare, or the harder-to-quantify cost of extra hours spent commuting instead of doing anything else. A “better” offer with a materially longer commute is genuinely worth less than its salary number suggests.

One-time money versus ongoing money — why the split matters

A signing bonus and relocation reimbursement are exactly that: one-time. This calculator deliberately separates first-year total value (which includes them) from ongoing annual value (which doesn’t), because conflating the two produces a systematically misleading comparison. An offer with a large signing bonus but a lower base salary can look like the better deal in year one and the worse deal in every year after — which is fine if you value near-term cash or expect to be there only a couple of years, but genuinely different from a comparison that implies the signing bonus repeats annually.

Equity: the line item that resists a clean number

Public company equity — RSUs with a known, liquid market price — is relatively straightforward to value: shares times current price times vesting percentage per year. Pre-IPO equity is a different animal entirely, since its value depends on a future liquidity event that may never happen at the valuation implied by your strike price or grant. Treat pre-IPO equity value in this calculator as a rough, optimistic-case placeholder rather than money in the bank, and weigh a comparison more heavily toward cash compensation when equity carries real uncertainty — the honest approach is under-weighting speculative equity rather than treating it as equivalent to guaranteed cash.

What a full comparison still won’t tell you

This calculator quantifies compensation — it doesn’t and can’t quantify career trajectory, learning opportunity, team quality, or how much you’d actually enjoy the work, all of which matter and none of which fit into a spreadsheet. Use the total-compensation number this tool produces as one solid input to the decision, not the entire decision. See the salary raise calculator if you’re negotiating within a current role rather than between two offers, and the relocation cost calculator if one of the offers requires a move.