Job Offer True Value Calculator

What this tool does

CM8-334 converts job offers into the only figure that can be compared fairly: what each one is worth for every hour of your life it consumes. It adds up everything the package is actually worth — base, the bonus you will probably get rather than the one on the letter, the employer's pension contribution, benefits you would actually use, equity discounted for the chance it is worth nothing, and one-off money spread over the years you will really stay — then divides by the hours the job genuinely takes, including the commute, over the working year your leave entitlement leaves behind.

The result routinely reorders offers. A job paying twenty per cent more, at fifty-two hours a week, five days on site with an hour each way and four fewer days of leave, is usually worth less an hour than the one it is being compared against — and nothing in the recruitment process is designed to tell you that.

Everything runs inside this single file. No account, no upload, no network request: your salary, your offers and your candid note about why one of them worries you stay on your computer.

The number that decides it

Hours you will actually work changes the ranking more than every other field combined, and it is the field people fill in most optimistically. Nobody accepting a job believes they will be the one staying late.

Do not use the contracted figure, and do not use what the hiring manager says. Ask somebody who currently does that job, in that team, what time they actually leave and how often they work at the weekend. If you cannot ask, look at what the job requires and be realistic: a role with a monthly close, a launch date or an on-call rota does not run to a contracted week. Where you genuinely do not know, put in the contracted hours plus a fifth and note the assumption.

The tool shows unpaid hours a year separately for exactly this reason. Twelve extra hours a week is a fortnight of unpaid work every month, and over a year it is the equivalent of about seven weeks. That is what the extra salary is buying, and it is worth seeing it written down.

Building the package honestly

Base is the contractual figure. Everything else is a claim of varying reliability, which is why the package chart separates them.

Employer pension is the most commonly ignored real difference between two offers. It is money paid on your behalf whether you notice it or not, and a five-point gap on a sixty-thousand salary is three thousand a year — more than most pay rises, and it compounds for decades.

Benefits should be valued at what they would cost you to buy, not what the employer says they cost. Value at zero anything you would never use: a gym membership you will not take up is worth nothing regardless of its price, and a car allowance you would spend on a car you already own is worth its cash value, not the car's.

One-off money — a signing bonus, relocation, a buyout of a bonus you are forfeiting — is spread across the tenure you set in Settings. This matters enormously. Ten thousand pounds looks like a ten-thousand-pound difference and is really about three thousand a year over a normal stay. If any of it is repayable should you leave inside two years, it is a loan and not a payment; enter only what you keep.

Bonus and equity odds

Both are discounted by a probability, because both are routinely quoted at their best case.

For the bonus, ask what it has actually paid for the last three years and use that. A scheme that has hit target every year is close to salary and deserves 90 or more. A discretionary scheme that paid twice in five years deserves 40. "It depends on company performance" means 50 at best, and the years it does not pay are precisely the years you would most want it.

For equity, the honest number depends entirely on the company. Vested shares in a listed business are nearly cash — 90 or above. Options in an early-stage private company are a lottery ticket: most such grants end up worth nothing, and a figure below 20 is the base rate rather than pessimism. The sample data includes exactly this case, because an offer that wins only when its equity is taken at face value is the single commonest way people talk themselves into the wrong job.

What the job costs you

Some spending exists only because of the job, and it comes straight off the package: fares, fuel and parking; childcare that is needed only because of these hours; a professional subscription they will not pay; a second car; clothing you would not otherwise buy.

Be careful to count only the difference. If you would run the car anyway, only the extra distance counts. If you already pay for childcare, only the additional hours count.

Commuting, and whether to count it

By default the tool counts commuting time as time the job costs you, because it is. An hour each way, five days a week, over a normal working year is around 460 hours — eleven and a half working weeks, unpaid, every year, and it does not appear anywhere in a salary comparison.

Days working from home reduce it proportionally, which is why a remote or hybrid role with a lower salary so often wins on this measure. Only count home working that is written down or genuinely established; the word "flexible" in an advertisement is not a policy, and the sample notes make that point deliberately.

If you would rather not count travel time — some people read, work or sleep on a train and genuinely do not experience it as lost — switch it off in Settings. The comparison then rests on money and working hours alone, and the travel cost is still deducted.

Tax

This tool applies no tax of any kind and makes no assumption about any country's regime, because it is used everywhere and a wrong assumption would be worse than none.

If you want an after-tax comparison, work out your own effective rate — total deductions divided by gross pay, not your marginal rate — and enter it on every row. Filling in some rows and not others produces a comparison that means nothing. In most cases the pre-tax comparison ranks offers identically, and it is only worth the trouble when two offers sit either side of a threshold or in different jurisdictions.

Reading the result

The headline is true value an hour. The gap column shows how far that sits from the naive figure — base salary divided by contracted hours — and a large negative gap means the advertised number is doing a great deal of work.

Where two offers land within about five per cent of each other, treat them as equal. The inputs are not precise enough to separate them, and pretending otherwise gives the arithmetic an authority it has not earned. At that point the decision belongs to everything this tool cannot see.

Using it to negotiate

The comparison is a better negotiating instrument than a salary demand, because it is specific and it is not about wanting more. "Your offer is worth less an hour than my current role once the extra eight hours a week and the commute are counted" is a fact about their offer, and it invites a solution rather than a refusal.

It also points at the cheapest things they can give you. An extra five days of leave, one day a week at home, or a two-point rise in the pension contribution often costs an employer far less than the equivalent salary and moves this calculation further. Salary is the one thing on the list with a queue of internal approvals behind it.

What it cannot tell you

This is a calculator, not a career adviser. It cannot price the work itself, the people you would work with, what you would learn, how secure the job is, whether the business will exist in three years, what the role does to your evenings, or how it changes what you can do next. Any of those can be worth more than every number here.

Use it for what it is good at: making sure that when you choose the lower hourly rate, you are doing it deliberately and for a reason you could say out loud.

The formulas

The 260 is 52 weeks of five days, before leave. Note what the true hourly figure does not do: it does not discount future money, and it does not attempt to value the pension contribution differently from cash in hand, although one is available now and the other in decades. Both simplifications work in the same direction for every offer, so the ranking survives them.

FAQ

Should I include my current role? Always. Without it the tool compares offers only with each other, and the most useful question — is any of this better than staying put — goes unanswered.

The best offer an hour is the lowest salary. Is that right? Arithmetically, probably yes, and it is the most common finding. Whether it is the right choice is a separate question: a lower salary is what appears on your next application, and it can constrain the offer after this one.

How do I value a company car? At what it would cost you to run the same car privately, less what you would have spent anyway. If you would not otherwise own a second car, that is nearly the whole cost; if you would, it is much less.

What about a four-day week on reduced pay? Enter the reduced salary and the four days' actual hours. The tool will usually show it as excellent value an hour, which is correct — and it will not tell you whether you can live on the total, which you must check separately.

Two offers are within two per cent. Which wins? Neither. The inputs are not that precise. Decide on the things this tool cannot measure.

Saving your work

Offers, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer, so a private window or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the comparison for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything. There is no undo.

A word of caution about the backup: it contains your salary, other people's offers to you and your private notes about them. Keep it somewhere you would keep a bank statement, and think twice before it lands in a work account or a shared drive.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This calculator answers one question — what each offer is worth for each hour of your life it consumes — and that is not the same as which job you should take. Several inputs are predictions about the future: bonuses that are "usually" paid, equity that may be worth nothing, and above all the hours you will really work, which candidates consistently underestimate for a job they want.

No tax of any kind is applied unless you enter an effective rate yourself, and nothing here is tax, financial, pension or legal advice. Where a figure is not in the written offer, treat it as an aspiration rather than a term — and remember that the parts of a job that make it worth doing are mostly not in this spreadsheet.