Job Offer Comparison Calculator

Base salary is the number everyone anchors on and it is routinely the least informative part of an offer. Bonus, equity, retirement match and the employer's share of health premiums can easily add thirty percent on top, and they vary enormously between companies. Two offers with identical salaries can differ by twenty thousand dollars a year once everything is counted, and the difference frequently runs opposite to the headline number.

Location changes the calculation again. A salary that looks generous in an expensive metro may buy considerably less than a smaller number somewhere cheaper, and cost of living indices exist to make that comparable. They are blunt instruments — housing dominates them and your own spending may not match the basket — but they are far better than comparing raw salaries across cities as though a dollar meant the same thing everywhere.

The commute is the factor people most consistently underweight, and it is the one most strongly linked to reported life satisfaction. An extra twenty minutes each way, three days a week, is around a hundred hours a year of unpaid time. Valuing it at your own hourly rate is a reasonable first approximation and usually reveals that a shorter commute is worth several thousand dollars a year — often more than the salary difference under discussion.

Equity deserves the most caution. Public company RSUs are close to cash and can be valued at face. Private company options are not: they carry a strike price, an uncertain valuation, a vesting cliff, and no market to sell into. Counting them at the company's own preferred-share valuation is how people end up disappointed, and discounting them heavily or ignoring them entirely is the more honest approach.