Why comparing offers is so easy to get wrong
The instinct when you hold two offers is to line up the base salaries and pick the bigger one. That instinct is wrong often enough to be dangerous, because a salary number means almost nothing on its own. It is quoted in different currencies, taxed at different rates, spent in cities with wildly different costs, and bundled with equity and bonuses that are not even annual cash. Each of those four distortions can flip the ranking. A larger gross in a high-tax, high-cost city can deliver less spendable lifestyle than a smaller gross somewhere efficient. The only honest comparison strips every distortion away and reduces each offer to one number: what it leaves you, in real terms, in a single place.
This tool performs that reduction in the open so you can trust the result. It annualises the package, so a four-year equity grant counts as a quarter of its value each year and a one-off signing bonus is spread rather than treated as recurring pay. It applies the destination country's income tax and mandatory contributions to get after-tax take-home. Then it converts every offer's net pay into the purchasing power of one anchor city, so the final row is genuinely apples to apples. The offer that wins that row is the one that makes you materially better off, regardless of which had the flashiest headline.
Reading the comparison table
The table walks down from the rawest number to the truest. Annualised total comp is the headline, useful for sanity-checking that an offer is in the right ballpark but the least reliable for a decision. After-tax take-home strips out the tax distortion and is already far more honest, especially when one offer is in a low-tax country and another in a high-tax one. Take-home per month is the figure your day-to-day life actually runs on. The final row, the cost-of-living-adjusted value, is the one to sort on: it expresses every offer in the same city's purchasing power, so a number that looks large only because it sits in an expensive place is brought back down to what it really buys. The trophy marks the winner on that fair basis.
When two offers come out close on the adjusted row, the decision moves off the numbers and onto everything the numbers cannot capture: the team, the work, growth, equity upside, benefits, and your own life circumstances. That is the right time for the comparison to hand over to judgement. But getting the money question settled first, honestly, means you are weighing those softer factors against an accurate financial picture rather than a misleading one.
From comparison to negotiation
A side-by-side comparison is also a negotiation asset. If one offer is genuinely behind on the adjusted basis, you have a precise, defensible figure for the gap, which is far more persuasive than a vague feeling that you could do better. Take the leading offer's adjusted value, work back to what it would take for the trailing offer to match it in local terms, and that is your ask. To pressure-test whether either offer is even competitive against the wider market before you start, run the stronger one through the offer evaluator, which places it on the real percentile distribution for the role, level, and city. The comparison tells you which offer is better; the evaluator tells you whether the better one is actually good.
Frequently asked questions
- How should I compare two job offers fairly?
- Never compare base salaries alone, and never compare gross to gross across different cities. The fair comparison has three steps. First, annualise each whole package so equity and one-off bonuses are converted to a yearly figure. Second, apply each city's tax to get after-tax take-home, because the same gross keeps very different shares of itself in different countries. Third, adjust for cost of living so a high salary in an expensive city is not flattered against a lower one somewhere cheap. This tool does all three and shows the result in one comparable currency.
- Why does the bottom row matter most?
- The bottom row converts each offer's after-tax take-home into a single city's purchasing power. It is the only row that answers the real question, which offer leaves you better off in practice. The headline total-comp row can be misleading: an offer with the biggest gross can finish last once a high tax rate and an expensive city are accounted for. Sorting on the adjusted row, not the gross, is how you avoid taking the offer that looks best on paper but feels worst in your bank account.
- How do you handle equity in the comparison?
- Equity is annualised by dividing the total grant value by the vesting period, the same way the offer evaluator does, so a four-year grant contributes a quarter of its value to each year's total comp. This treats equity as the company states it, which is reasonable for public-company stock. For startup options whose value is uncertain, discount the equity figure yourself before entering it, or use the dedicated equity calculator to model a realistic range first and bring a sober number here.
- Does it account for benefits, pension, and relocation?
- Not directly. The comparison focuses on the cash and equity components and the tax that applies to them, because those are the largest and most comparable parts of most offers. Benefits like health cover, pension matching, paid leave, and relocation support genuinely matter and can swing a close decision, so once the tool narrows it down, list the non-cash differences separately and weigh them against the gap the numbers show.
- Is this financial advice?
- No. It is a reference comparison built on transparent, documented tax and cost-of-living models for a single filer. It cannot capture your exact tax situation, your personal spending, or the value you place on non-cash factors. Use it to structure the decision and narrow the field, then verify the specifics and weigh what matters to you before accepting any offer.