Quick answer
Evaluate a job offer by pricing every component, not just base salary: the bonus at its realistic (not target) payout, the employer's pension or 401(k) contribution, healthcare costs on your side, paid leave, and equity at your own conservative estimate. Separate year-one cash (which a signing bonus inflates) from ongoing cash (which is what compounds), and treat everything the offer doesn't mention as a question to ask, not a blank to ignore.
The two-number rule: year-one cash vs. ongoing cash
Before pricing any individual component, split the offer into two numbers. Year-one cash is base plus signing bonus plus a realistic annual bonus. Ongoing cash is the same sum without the signing bonus — because the signing bonus happens once, and from year two onward it's gone. Employers know the first number is the more flattering one, which is why a thinner base is so often dressed with a signing bonus. That's not dishonest — one-time money is genuinely cheaper for them to give and genuinely useful for you to get — but comparing offers on year-one cash alone systematically favors whoever front-loaded hardest.
Ongoing cash is the number that compounds. Your future raises are mostly percentages of it, your bonus is usually a percentage of it, and at your next job the market will price you partly off it. When two offers are close, the one with the higher base and smaller signing bonus is usually worth more within two years, all else equal. Our free Offer Evaluator computes both numbers side by side from whatever you enter — entirely in your browser.
Bonuses: price the mechanics, not the headline
A "target bonus of 15%" is a possibility wearing a number. What it's actually worth depends on mechanics the offer letter rarely spells out: is payout driven by company performance, personal objectives, or manager discretion? Is there a floor? Is it prorated in year one — and if you start in October, does that make your first-year bonus close to zero? The single most useful question you can ask is also the simplest: what did this bonus actually pay out, on average, in each of the last two years? A company that hit target twice running has a credible 15%. A company that paid 40% of target both years is offering you 6% and calling it 15%.
Watch the year-one proration in particular. It's standard practice, it's rarely volunteered, and for anyone starting in the second half of the year it can quietly remove several thousand from the first-year figure you thought you were comparing.
Equity: real value, wide error bars
If the offer includes equity, the norms are well established even where the values aren't. At venture-backed companies the standard remains a four-year vesting schedule with a one-year cliff — equity platform Carta's data puts roughly 70% of employee grants on a cliff, almost always at one year. Nothing vests until you've stayed twelve months; leave in month eleven and the equity was decorative. The questions that determine value are mechanical: what type (options, which you must pay to exercise, versus RSUs, which are simply granted), how many units, what percentage of the company that represents, what the last valuation was, and — the one almost nobody asks — what happens to unvested equity if the company is acquired or you're let go.
For public-company RSUs, a reasonable approach is to count the annual vesting value at today's share price as compensation, mentally discounted for volatility. For private-company equity, honesty requires wider error bars: there is no liquid market for the shares, and the difference between the optimistic case and zero is real. Count private equity as genuine upside, but make the decision work on the cash package alone if you can.
Pensions and retirement money: the component people forget to count
An employer's retirement contribution is salary you can't spend yet — but it is salary, and it varies enough between offers to move a comparison. In the UK, auto-enrolment sets a legal floor: 8% of qualifying earnings in total, of which the employer must pay at least 3% (GOV.UK). Many employers pay well above the floor, and some will raise their contribution if you raise yours — an offer paying 3% and an offer matching up to 8% differ by thousands a year on the same base, invisibly.
In the US, 401(k) matching is voluntary but widespread, and the current data shows how much money moves through it: Fidelity's Q1 2026 retirement analysis reported a record combined savings rate of 14.4% of pay across its 26,800 plans, with average employer contributions of about $2,080 per quarter for participating employees. The match formula and its vesting schedule are what to pin down — an employer contribution that vests over four years is worth less to someone who might leave in two. Canada's group RRSP matches work similarly; in much of the EU, occupational schemes and collectively agreed pension arrangements vary too widely by country and sector for one benchmark, which is exactly why "what pension arrangement applies to this role?" belongs on your questions list rather than your assumptions list.
Australian offers add a compulsory layer of their own: the Superannuation Guarantee, a percentage employers must pay on top of salary into a retirement fund, reached 12% of qualifying earnings from 1 July 2026 under the new Payday Super rules (Australian Taxation Office). It isn't usually a lever employers move the way a 401(k) match can be — treat it as a fixed addition on top of base — but always confirm whether a quoted salary figure already assumes it's included, since the same number can mean two different actual packages.
New Zealand's equivalent is KiwiSaver, and its minimum contribution rates are rising: both the default employee and employer rate lift to 3.5% from 1 April 2026, climbing again to 4% from 1 April 2028 (Inland Revenue). As in Australia, that's a statutory floor rather than a negotiated figure for most employers — though above-minimum employer matching does exist and is worth asking about, the same way a US candidate would ask about 401(k) matching terms.
Healthcare: a rounding error in Europe, a five-figure line item in the US
For UK, EU, and (for the most part) Canadian offers, healthcare is a perk on top of a public system — private cover, dental, and similar benefits are worth something, but they rarely swing a decision. In the US, health coverage is a core component of pay. KFF's 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey put the average annual premium for employer family coverage at $26,993, of which workers paid an average of $6,850 out of their own paychecks — and both premiums and deductibles vary widely between employers. Two US offers with identical salaries can genuinely differ by several thousand dollars a year on this line alone. Ask what the plan costs you per month at the tier you need, what the deductible is, and when coverage starts — a coverage gap between jobs has a price too.
Time off: compensation you spend as weeks
Paid leave differs more across regions than any other component. UK workers have a statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks — 28 days for a full-time week, and bank holidays may be counted within it (GOV.UK). The EU's Working Time Directive sets a floor of four weeks, which many countries and collective agreements exceed. The US has no statutory minimum at all: per the Bureau of Labor Statistics' March 2025 data, the most common band after one year of service is 10–14 days, with access and amounts varying sharply by industry and tenure. That makes leave a real variable in US and Canadian offers, and an "unlimited PTO" policy deserves its own follow-up: what do people on this team actually take? Unlimited-in-writing has a way of averaging below the old fixed allowance in practice.
When comparing offers, price the difference concretely: five extra days of leave on a £50,000 salary is roughly £1,000 of paid time — and unlike a signing bonus, it recurs every year.
Cost to Company: pricing an Indian offer correctly
An Indian offer's headline CTC (Cost to Company) figure isn't one number to compare directly against a US or UK base salary — it's fixed pay (basic salary and allowances such as HRA, guaranteed monthly) plus variable pay (performance bonus, commission, and other targets-linked components, which isn't guaranteed). An offer that's 85% fixed is worth more in practice than an identical-looking CTC figure that's only 70% fixed, even though both quote the same total. Ask for the fixed/variable split, and for the variable component specifically, ask what it's paid on — company performance, personal objectives, or manager discretion — the same diligence this guide recommends for a US or UK bonus.
Factor in what leaving your current role actually costs, too. If your notice period runs longer than a new employer wants to wait, the shortfall is commonly bought out — calculated on fixed monthly CTC divided by 26 or 30 days and multiplied by the days remaining — and paid to your current employer. It's a contractual matter rather than a statutory one, so terms vary, and the tax treatment differs sharply depending on who pays: a buyout you pay yourself isn't tax-deductible, while a buyout your new employer reimburses is fully taxable to you as a perquisite. Price it into the offer's real value before comparing it to what you're leaving, and ask whether the new employer will cover it — a genuinely common ask in competitive sectors. Our guide on negotiating a job offer covers how to raise that ask directly, and our Indian resume guide covers the rest of the market's conventions.
Gulf packages: allowances, gratuity, and the tax-free framing that cuts both ways
Gulf offers are commonly structured as a basic salary plus separate allowances — housing and transport most often, sometimes education or utilities — rather than one consolidated figure, and the split is worth pricing carefully rather than skimming past. End-of-service gratuity, the region's mandatory severance-style payment, is calculated on basic salary alone: under the UAE's Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, it accrues at 21 days' basic pay per year of service for the first five years and 30 days' basic pay per year after that, capped at two years' total basic salary, and only after one full year of service. A package that's mostly allowances sitting on a thin basic salary looks identical on the headline total but quietly delivers less gratuity over time — ask what portion of any offer is actually basic salary before comparing packages, not several years into the job.
Most Gulf salaries also carry no personal income tax — the UAE, for example, levies none on wages or salaries — so a Gulf offer's gross and net figures sit close together, unlike a competing offer from a taxed jurisdiction where the two can differ by a third or more. That makes a lower-looking Gulf gross number potentially the stronger net offer, and it cuts the other way too: a Gulf salary being untaxed locally doesn't automatically mean every reporting or tax obligation back home disappears — some nationalities retain obligations regardless of where the income is earned, so check your own position rather than assuming the tax-free framing is the whole story. Our Dubai CV guide and Gulf service cover the rest of the region's conventions.
The fine print that becomes very large print later
Three things to read before the compensation discussion is over. Notice and probation: UK and EU contracts typically set notice periods on both sides (UK professional roles commonly carry one to three months), and EU rules cap probation at six months except in justified cases — during probation, notice is often shorter and some benefits may not yet apply. Clawbacks: signing bonuses frequently carry repayment clauses if you leave within a year; know the terms before you count the money. And restrictive covenants: non-competes and non-solicits cost you nothing today and potentially a great deal at your next move — read them now, while you still have leverage to push back.
The unifying rule: anything you're counting on — title, salary, bonus terms, equity, remote arrangements, start date — belongs in writing. If it influenced your decision and it isn't in the offer, it isn't yet part of the offer.
Turn the gaps into questions
Run down the components above against your actual offer letter. Every component the letter doesn't address is not a blank — it's a question, and asking it before you accept is both normal and expected. Our free Offer Evaluator does this mechanically: enter what your offer contains and it generates the questions-to-resolve checklist from what's missing, plus a structured comparison if you're weighing a second offer or your current package against it. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
And once you can see the whole offer clearly, the natural next question is what to do about the parts you'd like to improve — which is its own craft, covered in our guide on how and when to negotiate a job offer.
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