Two job offers on the table. One pays more. It seems obvious which one to take. And then you look closer, and the higher salary has fewer holidays, a longer commute, expects you to stay late, and the pension contribution is half what the other role offers. Suddenly it's not obvious at all.
Why salary comparisons miss the point
Salary is the one number both offers have in common, which is why it dominates the comparison. It's a single figure, it's unambiguous, and it's easy to subtract one from the other. But it's also missing most of what actually determines how much a job is worth to you.
Consider what a job actually consists of. There's the money, yes, but also the time it takes (contracted hours, overtime expectations, commute), the benefits it provides (pension, health cover, perks), and the actual purchasing power of the salary once you account for the costs of the job itself. Two offers with the same gross salary can have dramatically different real values once you put all of that on the table.
The holiday problem
Paid leave is money. This is not a metaphor, it is literally money, because each holiday day is a working day you get paid for without working. An employer offering 25 days plus 9 bank holidays is giving you 34 paid non-working days a year. An employer offering 20 days plus 9 bank holidays is giving you 29. That's a five-day difference, worth roughly 2% of your annual salary. On a €50,000 package, that's about €1,000 of real value difference, before a single hour is worked.
More relevantly: extra holidays reduce your effective working hours over the year, which raises your real hourly rate. If both jobs pay the same but one gives you five more days off, you're getting paid more per hour at the generous one. This sounds like a technicality until you're the one who doesn't have enough leave to take a two-week holiday and a few sick days in the same year.
The pension multiplier
Employer pension contributions are one of the most undervalued parts of a compensation package. A 5% employer contribution on a €50,000 salary is €2,500 a year going into your pension, money you don't pay tax on now, that compounds over time, and that you'd have to earn and save yourself if the job didn't provide it.
Compare that to a job paying €52,000 with no pension contribution. The higher salary looks better on paper. But if the first job's pension contribution is worth €2,500, you'd need to save that from the €52,000 salary yourself, and you'd do it with after-tax money. The pension contribution from an employer is worth more than the equivalent amount of gross salary, because it goes in pre-tax.
The calculator converts both employers' pension contributions into annual euro values so you can see them next to everything else.
The commute tax
A commute is a tax on your time and your money, and it varies enormously between jobs. A role in the city centre with an hour-long commute each way is asking for ten hours of your week that a remote-first role isn't. At a real hourly rate of €15, those ten hours are worth €150 a week, €7,050 a year, of your time that belongs to the job without compensation.
And then there's the actual cost. If getting to the higher-paying job costs you €80 a week in fuel, train fares and parking, and the lower-paying job costs €30, that's €50 a week or €2,350 a year of difference in your real takehome. Spread over a year, a commute difference of 30 minutes each way can swing a job comparison by several thousand euros.
Days on site matter more than ever
Remote and hybrid working has made days on site one of the most practically significant variables in a job comparison. Every day you work from home is a day without commuting costs, commuting time, bought lunches, and the general friction of being somewhere you didn't start the morning. If one job offers three days at home and another offers one, that difference compounds across the year into real time and real money.
The calculator lets you set days on site for each offer separately, so the comparison captures this properly rather than assuming both jobs have the same working pattern.
A worked example
Two offers. Offer A: €62,000 salary, 25 days holiday, 5% employer pension, €120 a month private health cover, 40 contracted hours, 3 unpaid overtime hours a week, 3 days on site, 30-minute commute at €12 a day.
Offer B: €68,000 salary, 20 days holiday, 3% employer pension, €200 a month health cover, 40 contracted hours, 6 unpaid overtime hours a week, 5 days on site, 50-minute commute at €18 a day.
Headline difference: Offer B pays €6,000 more. Open and shut, right?
Run the numbers:
Offer A's total value per year: salary €62,000 + pension €3,100 − health €1,440 − commute €1,692 = €61,968 effective value, over 43 real working hours a week.
Offer B's total value per year: salary €68,000 + pension €2,040 − health €2,400 − commute €3,960 = €63,680 effective value, over 46 real working hours a week.
Offer A's effective hourly rate (accounting for holidays and real hours): approximately €31.40.
Offer B's effective hourly rate: approximately €30.20.
Offer B pays more in gross salary. Offer A is worth more per hour of your actual life. Which one you prefer depends on what you're optimising for, but at least now you're choosing with the real numbers rather than the headline one.
The things the calculator cannot capture
Some things matter enormously and can't be put in a spreadsheet. Career trajectory, the quality of your manager, the culture, the people you'd work with, how interesting the work is, whether the company is stable. These are real factors in a job decision and they deserve weight.
The calculator is not trying to make the decision for you. It's trying to make sure the financial comparison is honest, so that when you factor in the non-financial considerations, you're doing so from an accurate baseline rather than a misleading one. If you're choosing the lower-value offer for non-financial reasons, that's a completely legitimate choice. But you should know you're making it, not discover it later.
Put both offers into the calculator and see which one actually wins once everything is priced in.
Compare your job offers →Frequently asked questions
Should I negotiate before or after comparing properly?
Compare first. You can't negotiate effectively if you don't know which offer is actually better and by how much. Once you know the real gap, you can go back to the lower-value offer with specific numbers, "your pension contribution is 2% lower and my commute costs €1,800 more, so for the offers to be equivalent I'd need the salary to be at least €X" is a much stronger negotiating position than "the other place offered more."
How do I value a bonus if it's not guaranteed?
Discount it. If the bonus is described as "up to 15%" but you've spoken to people there and it typically pays out at 6-8%, use 6-8% as your input. Using the maximum figure flatters the offer in a way that may not reflect reality. If you have no information at all, use zero and treat anything you receive as a pleasant surprise.
One offer has equity or share options. How do I compare?
Equity is very difficult to value honestly, especially in private companies. The standard advice is to value it at zero for comparison purposes and treat it as upside, either the company does well and it's worth something, or it doesn't and it isn't. Making a job decision based on projected equity value is optimistic at best and misleading at worst. Take the job for the cash compensation; consider the equity a lottery ticket rather than a salary component.
What if overtime varies a lot week to week?
Use an honest average. If some weeks are 45 hours and some are 38, use 41 or 42 as your input. The goal is to capture the typical experience, not the best or worst week.
Does the calculator account for the cost of living in different cities?
Not directly, it compares the financial value of each offer in isolation. If one job is in a more expensive city, that's a factor you'd need to weigh separately by estimating higher rent, food and transport costs. A €70,000 salary in London and a €70,000 salary in a smaller city have very different purchasing powers, and that's worth factoring in for any cross-location comparison.
Should I tell one employer what the other is offering?
Only if you're genuinely willing to take their offer if they match. Using a competing offer purely as a negotiating tactic, with no intention of taking it, is a risky move that can damage the relationship before it starts. If you have a genuine preference for one employer, be honest about that, most hiring managers respect the directness and it often leads to a better negotiation than playing them off against each other.