Job Offer Comparison Calculator
Compare 2-3 job offers side-by-side with a weighted multi-factor model. Per-offer total comp + weighted score + winner verdict + comparison table — covering base, equity, bonus, benefits, commute, remote-flex, growth, prestige, and security.
Job Offer Comparison Calculator
Step 1 — Enter your offers
Fill in 2 or 3 offers. Leave numbers at 0 for any factor you don't want to compare. Use "Load sample" for a worked example.
Offer 1
Offer 2
Offer 3
Step 2 — Set importance weights (0 = ignore, 10 = critical)
Drag each slider to reflect how much each factor matters to you. The tool normalises and re-scores.
Side-by-side comparison
Weighted score breakdown — per-factor contribution
What this score does NOT capture — read before deciding
- Manager fit. The single biggest predictor of job satisfaction in 30 years of Gallup research. A great manager at a mediocre offer beats a bad manager at a great offer. Ask: did you click with them in the interview? Did they answer hard questions honestly?
- Team chemistry. You'll spend 8+ hours a day with these people. The numbers can't measure whether you'd actually enjoy the daily standup, lunch, or after-work drinks with them.
- Company culture & values fit. Glassdoor reviews, Blind, and back-channel reference calls (ex-employees on LinkedIn) catch what offer letters hide. If everyone says "great place to work" with one canned sentence, that's a flag.
- Equity dilution & exit probability. Especially for startups — a $90K annualised equity figure on a Series B that gets crushed in the next funding round is worth $0. Discount aggressively.
- Personal life fit. Will the new schedule give you enough time with family / kids / hobbies? On-call rotations? Travel expectations? Numbers don't cover lifestyle cost.
- Optionality & resume effect. Some offers are "exit ramps" — taking a name-brand role for 2 years to set up your next 5. Others are "long-haul" — staying 5+ years with vesting cliffs. They're not directly comparable in dollar terms.
How to use the Job Offer Comparison Calculator
Gather the full comp package for each offer
Don't just compare base salary — that's how 60% of candidates pick the wrong offer. Pull base, annualised equity, signing bonus, target bonus %, and benefit value for each. For equity: 4-year RSU grant ÷ 4 (public companies); discount private-company equity 30-50% on top. Benefit value typically runs $8-15K/yr in the US (health, 401k match, life insurance, WFH stipend) and similar in Singapore (insurance, transport allowance, AWS).
Score the soft factors honestly (0-10)
For each offer rate: commute in round-trip minutes (0 = remote), remote flex (0 = in-office mandatory, 5 = 2-3 days hybrid, 10 = fully remote), growth potential (manager strength, mentorship, learning budget), prestige (brand recognition, leverage for next offer), and security (financial health, runway, layoff risk). Resist the urge to skew scores toward the offer you already prefer — get a partner or trusted peer to score independently and compare.
Assign weights that reflect YOUR priorities
The default weights are reasonable for a mid-career professional, but they're not your weights. New parent? Crank commute and remote-flex to 9-10. Hungry early-career? Growth and prestige weigh more than security. Approaching FIRE? Security drops, total comp goes to 10. The weight sliders are the most important part of this tool — they encode what you actually care about, in numbers, before you let post-hoc rationalisation distort the decision.
Read the verdict — then ignore it if your gut disagrees
The weighted score is a decision support tool, not a decision-maker. If Offer B "wins" by 2 points but every fibre of your gut says Offer A, your gut is encoding signals the tool can't capture — manager vibe, culture fit, life stage. The numbers are useful precisely when they confirm or sharply contradict the gut. A confident gut + a winning score = act. A confident gut + a losing score = pause and dig into why — that gap is the most valuable output of the entire exercise.
The weighted multi-factor model — and why total-comp-only comparisons mislead
Job offer comparison is one of the most consequential decisions of a career — and one of the most badly handled. The default approach for most candidates is to compare base salaries, maybe glance at equity, and pick the bigger number. This is wrong on three levels: it ignores the 30-40% of total comp that lives outside base, it ignores entirely the non-financial factors (commute, remote, growth, manager, prestige) that determine whether you'll still be at the job in 18 months, and it gives no structured way to weigh those non-financial factors against the dollars. The tool above implements a Weighted Sum Model — the same multi-criteria decision analysis technique used by procurement teams, vendor selection committees, and military equipment buyers — applied to your career.
How the weighted scoring math works
Each factor is normalised to a 0-1 score (so dollars and remote-flex ratings live on the same scale), then multiplied by your importance weight, then summed and divided by the total weight to get a 0-100 weighted score per offer. The compensation factor is normalised relative to the highest-comp offer (so the best-paying offer gets 1.0 on the comp axis; others get fractions of that). Commute is inverted (0 minutes = 1.0, 90+ minutes = 0). The other 0-10 factors are divided by 10. This means the tool is sensitive to relative differences within your candidate set — not to absolute market positioning. If all three of your offers are stingy on equity, the tool can't tell you that — you need market-range data from levels.fyi, NodeFlair, or Glassdoor alongside this comparison. We recommend running our Salary Negotiation Anchor Calculator first to set the right total-comp band, then this tool to pick between actual offers in hand.
The highest base salary is rarely the best offer. Equity, growth, commute, remote-flex — they all compound differently over a 3-5 year tenure.
The factors that matter most — and how to score them honestly
Total compensation is the headline number, but it's a composite — base + annualised equity + signing/4 + base × target-bonus% + benefits. Base salary is the most valuable dollar (it compounds via raises and sets future-offer anchors). Equity is the most volatile (public-company RSU can double or halve over the vesting period; private-company equity often goes to zero). Signing bonus is one-time money — useful for bridging short-term gaps but it does not compound. Commute is the most underweighted factor by candidates: a 60-minute round-trip is 250+ hours per year of unpaid life — about 6 working weeks. Remote flexibility has become a near-cash benefit since 2020 — surveys consistently find candidates value fully-remote at $8-15K/yr equivalent. Growth potential is harder to measure but is the highest-leverage factor for early-career professionals: a job that compounds your skill set is worth 10-20% lower comp for 2-3 years if the next role pays significantly more. Prestige matters disproportionately for your next offer (Big Tech alumni get inbound recruiter spam for years). Job security matters most when you have a mortgage, kids, or an aging parent depending on you — and during macroeconomic downturns, when the cost of a misjudged startup bet can be 6-12 months unemployed.
ASEAN compensation context — what's specific to the region
ASEAN job offers have structural quirks that US-centric calculators get wrong. Singapore mandates a 13th-month salary (Annual Wage Supplement / AWS) as a near-universal practice — when comparing a Singapore offer to a US one, add 1/12th to the headline base salary to get the equivalent annual figure. Malaysia requires EPF (Employees Provident Fund) employer contributions of 11-13% of monthly wage, on top of salary — this is direct retirement savings the employer pays in. Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand all have variants of mandatory year-end bonuses (THR in Indonesia, 13th month in PH, bonus in TH). ASEAN tech salaries in dollar terms typically run 30-50% of San Francisco Bay Area equivalents for senior engineering roles — but with 50% lower cost of living, zero state income tax (Singapore), and lower personal income tax in most countries, take-home and savings rates often match or exceed US numbers. Best regional data sources: NodeFlair (Southeast Asia tech comp), levels.fyi (global tech, thin APAC coverage), Glassdoor, Glints (job-listing data for SEA), and LinkedIn Salary Insights. When using this calculator on ASEAN offers, normalise to the same currency (USD or local), include the mandatory bonus in your base figure, and remember equity is rare outside US-listed tech firms — most ASEAN offers are base + AWS + bonus + EPF/equivalents.
10 Things to Know About Comparing Job Offers
The Weighted Sum Model used in this tool dates to the 1960s — formalised by Wiegmann & Massof for multi-criteria decision analysis. It's now the standard technique for vendor selection, procurement, and military equipment buys.
Roughly 60% of candidates pick the offer with the highest base salary even when total comp on another offer is meaningfully higher — base salary anchoring is a documented behavioural bias in offer-evaluation research.
A 30-minute one-way commute costs you about 250 hours per year — roughly 6 working weeks of unpaid life. Surveys consistently find candidates undervalue commute by 50-70% when scoring offers.
Fully-remote work is now valued by candidates at roughly $8-15K/yr equivalent — Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom's 2023 research puts the figure at around 8% of salary on average across knowledge workers.
Gallup's 30-year research on engagement consistently finds that manager quality is the single biggest predictor of job satisfaction — outweighing comp, prestige, and growth combined. The tool's score can't measure this. Your gut can.
Private-company equity should be discounted 30-70% from face value depending on stage: Seed/Series A → discount 70-90%, Series B/C → 50-70%, Series D+ with revenue → 30-50%. Most candidates apply zero discount and get burned at exit.
The average signing bonus clawback period in US tech is 12 months — leave before then and you typically owe the full pre-tax amount back. Don't compare a $20K signing bonus to $20K of base salary; base compounds, signing doesn't.
Singapore requires a 13th-month salary (AWS) as near-universal practice — meaning a "$120K" Singapore base is effectively $130K annualised. Malaysia's EPF employer contribution of 11-13% is direct retirement savings on top of salary.
ASEAN senior tech salaries run roughly 30-50% of SF Bay Area in dollar terms, but with 50% lower cost of living and zero (Singapore) or low state income tax, take-home savings rates often match or exceed Bay Area figures.
Multi-criteria decision tools work best when the weighted scores confirm your gut. When the score sharply contradicts your gut, that's the most valuable output — it signals an unmeasured factor (manager, culture, life stage) you should investigate before deciding.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Because total comp is roughly 50-70% of what makes a job good. A $200K offer with a 90-minute commute, no remote, a weak manager, and a struggling employer can easily be worse than a $170K offer that is remote, has a strong manager, and is at a growing company. The weighted model forces you to put dollar weight against non-dollar factors — and to make those weights explicit before you let post-hoc rationalisation distort the decision.
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Total comp = base salary + annualised equity + (signing bonus ÷ 4) + (base × target bonus %) + benefits dollar value. Signing bonus is divided by 4 because it's one-time money and most candidates compare offers over a 3-5 year decision horizon — including the full signing-bonus value as if it recurs every year would overweight it. For private-company equity, you should manually discount the face value 30-70% before entering it (the tool can't tell whether your equity is Series A or post-IPO RSU).
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Leave the third offer's fields blank (or zero them out). The tool will still compute a comparison, but the third column's scores will be near-zero. Alternatively, use the third slot for "current job" as a baseline — if your current role beats both new offers on weighted score, the answer is to stay (or use the offers as leverage to renegotiate where you are).
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Use this rubric: 0 = mandatory 5-days in office, no exceptions. 2 = 4 days in office, 1 day flex. 5 = true 50/50 hybrid (2-3 days/week in office). 7 = remote-first with occasional in-office (1-2 days/month). 10 = fully remote, no in-office requirement. Beware of "hybrid" offers that turn out to be 4+ days mandated — get this in writing from the recruiter before accepting.
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Discount the face value heavily. Seed / Series A: discount 70-90% (most fail). Series B/C: discount 50-70%. Series D+ with real revenue: discount 30-50%. Late-stage with confirmed IPO path: 20-30%. Then enter the discounted figure as "Equity (annualised $)". Always model the offer with full equity AND with zero equity — pick the offer that wins in the zero-equity scenario if you can. Equity is upside; comp + benefits + lifestyle are the floor.
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Higher early in your career, lower as you mature. Big-Tech / FAANG / brand-name consulting on your resume generates years of inbound recruiter interest — it's an option-value asset. In your first 5-10 years, weight prestige at 7-9. After 10+ years, your actual track record matters more than the logos behind it; weight prestige 3-5. There's also a regional dimension: in ASEAN, brand recognition for US Big Tech is disproportionately strong — a 2-year stint at Google Singapore is a powerful career signal for the next 5-10 years.
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Three big differences. (1) Singapore mandates AWS (13th-month salary) as near-universal practice — when entering Singapore offers, multiply the monthly base by 13, not 12. (2) Malaysia EPF employer contribution is 11-13% on top of salary — add this to "Benefits". (3) Equity is rare outside US-listed tech firms in the region — most local offers are base + AWS + bonus + retirement contributions. Use NodeFlair, Glints, or Glassdoor SG for regional comp benchmarking before running comparisons.
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This is the most valuable output of the entire exercise. The gap between the score and your gut is encoding an unmeasured factor — usually manager fit, culture, team chemistry, or a life-stage consideration the tool can't see. Don't override blindly; investigate. Ask: which factor is my gut weighting that the tool ignores? Can I score that factor and add it to the comparison? If after honest analysis your gut still disagrees, your gut usually wins — but you'll have made the decision with eyes open instead of by accident.
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No. Internal analysis only. Sharing your scoring framework gives the recruiter intelligence on what to push (or where you'll concede). What you can share with the losing offer: "I've decided to accept another role — your comp was competitive but the [growth / remote / location] factors aligned better elsewhere." Vague enough that you don't give them ammo for future negotiations, specific enough that they understand the gap if they want to come back with a counter.
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No. All calculation happens entirely in your browser via JavaScript. Open DevTools → Network and watch — there is zero outbound traffic. Your offers, company names, salary figures, and scores never leave your device.
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