Counteroffer Calculator
Free counteroffer calculator. Compare your employer's counteroffer against the new job offer on real pay, commute, and time — then weight it by counteroffer risk, the documented chance you leave within a year. Solves for the break-even failure rate so you know exactly when accepting the counter stops being worth it.
Last reviewed: · Reviewed by the Money Scale editorial team · How we source our data
Power mode. Every input exposed, every assumption sourced, charts and shareables.
Current (today)
$185,000$150,000
$15,000
$20,000
Counteroffer
$212,000$170,000
$17,000
$25,000
New offer
$231,000$178,000
$18,000
$35,000
$20,000
Commute & time
50 min
20 min
3 days
$40
$12
$6
Counteroffer risk & assumptions
50%
12 mo
2 mo
$2,000
30%
36 mo
Recruiters widely cite that ~80% of people who accept a counteroffer leave within six months, and up to 9 in 10 within a year — figures that are repeated everywhere but rarely well-sourced, so treat them as a strong caution, not gospel. The raise seldom fixes why you were looking, and your loyalty is now in question. Adjust the probability to match your honest read of your own situation.
Take the new offer
On paper the new offer is +$19,000/yr vs the counter. After tax, commute, and counteroffer risk, its expected value over 36 months is +$74,955 ahead of accepting the counter.
Counter — expected value
$413,793
$141,872/yr after tax & commute
New offer — expected value
$488,748
$158,916/yr after tax & commute
Commute time swing
−72 hr/yr
the new job gives time back
Educational tool, not career or financial advice. The money is only half the decision. A counteroffer almost never fixes the reasons people actually leave — manager, growth, burnout, culture. If those drove your search, weight the non-money side heavily even when the dollars are close. Equity is compared as an annual grant value; when forfeited unvested equity is the real issue, use the Golden Handcuffs calculator.
🤝 raw gap $19,000/yr
On paper the new offer is ahead by $19,000/yr.
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The Counteroffer Calculator settles the money side of one of the most stressful career decisions there is: your employer has made a counteroffer to keep you, and a new company has an offer on the table. Generic 'offer comparison' tools stop at total comp, but a counteroffer is a special case because of one well-documented fact — a large share of people who accept a counteroffer are gone within 6 to 24 months. The raise rarely fixes why you were looking, and accepting it can quietly mark you as a flight risk. So the right comparison isn't just 'which number is bigger.' This tool computes total comp for the counter and the offer, converts both to after-tax dollars, subtracts the true cost of each commute (your time and transit cost), and then weights the counter by the probability it 'fails' — leaving you back on the market having forfeited the offer in front of you. It even solves for the break-even failure rate: the exact probability at which accepting the counter stops being the better bet, so you can check it against your honest read of your own manager and situation.
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How this calculator works
- Enter your current pay, the counteroffer, and the new offer — base, target bonus, and annual equity for each, plus any sign-on the new offer includes.
- Add the commute for your current job and the new job (round-trip minutes), how many days a week you'd be in the office, what your time is worth per hour, and the daily transit cost of each.
- Set the counteroffer risk: the chance the counter 'fails' (you leave or are let go) within a window of months, and the job-search gap you'd face if it does.
- Set your marginal tax rate, any one-time switching cost, and your decision horizon.
- Read the verdict: the raw annual gap, each path's after-tax value net of commute, the risk-adjusted expected value over your horizon, and the break-even failure rate at which the counter stops winning.
EV(offer) = net_new × H + signon − switch_cost
EV(counter) = (1−p)·[net_co × H] + p·[net_co × (H − gap)]
break-even p* solves EV(counter) = EV(offer)Each option is reduced to an after-tax monthly cash flow net of its commute cost. Taking the offer is valued over the full horizon plus sign-on, less one-time switching cost. Accepting the counter is an expected value: with probability (1−p) you stay the whole horizon at the counter; with probability p the counter fails after m months — and because you've already declined the external offer, you sit out a search gap and land back at your current comp, so a failed counter simply costs you `gap` months of pay. Because EV(counter) is linear in p, the tool solves directly for the break-even failure rate p* — the single number that decides it.
- net_co, net_new
- After-tax monthly comp net of commute, for counter / new offer
- H
- Decision horizon in months
- p
- Probability the counteroffer fails within the risk window
- m
- Risk window (months) the failure probability applies to
- gap
- Job-search gap (months at ~$0) if the counter fails
- p*
- Break-even failure rate where the two paths tie
Frequently asked questions
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