Salary is the number people negotiate and it is roughly two thirds of the picture. What the other third is made of, which parts are real money, and which are worth nothing until they vest. General information, not personalized financial advice.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures what employers actually spend, and for June 2026 the civilian average was $49.46 per hour worked: $33.85 in wages and salaries, $15.61 in benefits. In proportion, 68.4% wages and 31.6% benefits.
Applied to a $100,000 salary at the same ratio, that implies roughly $46,115 of benefits on top — a total cost to the employer near $146,115. That is not what the benefits are worth to you, and the difference between those two numbers is most of what this page is about. But it does establish the scale: the thing left out of the comparison is not a rounding error.
It also explains why two offers with the same salary are routinely not the same offer, and why a smaller salary can be the better one. The job offer comparison exists to do this arithmetic, including the state tax and cost-of-living differences that move the answer as much as the benefits do.
An employer 401(k) match is the clearest case: money that appears only if you contribute enough to trigger it, and is otherwise forfeited. On a $100,000 salary with a 50% match on the first 6%, contributing 6% earns $3,000 a year you did not have to fund. That is 3% of salary, and it is worth its face value, subject to vesting.
The health premium is the other one. What you pay comes out pretax, so a $250-a-month premium costs you less than $3,000 a year of take-home; what the employer pays never appears anywhere you can see. A difference of $150 a month in premiums between two offers is a real $1,800-a-year difference in the same units as salary, and it is the most commonly ignored line in any comparison.
Running the same $100,000 through the site's own model — single filer, no state income tax, 6% deferral, a 50% match to 6%, a $250 monthly premium — gives $72,390 of take-home, $6,000 of your own money into the 401(k), and $3,000 of match: about $81,390 of total value from a $100,000 headline. How your paycheck works covers where the rest went.
Vesting is the schedule on which money already credited to you actually becomes yours. It applies to employer 401(k) contributions and to equity, and the shapes are worth knowing: cliff vesting gives you nothing until a date and then everything up to it; graded vesting hands over a slice at a time. Your own contributions are always yours immediately — it is the employer's portion that waits.
The practical consequence is that leaving is not free, and the cost is knowable in advance. Anyone weighing a move within the first few years of a job should find out what is unvested before deciding, because it is an amount, not a feeling, and it sometimes changes the answer.
It also means "total compensation" figures quoted in an offer letter are usually annualised as though everything vests evenly, which rarely matches reality. A four-year grant with a one-year cliff is worth nothing at all if you leave in month eleven.
Restricted stock units in a listed company are close to deferred cash: when they vest they are taxed as ordinary income at whatever the shares are worth that day, and you can usually sell them the same day. The uncertainty is the share price, which is real but bounded by a market that exists.
Options and private-company equity are a different thing wearing similar words. An option is the right to buy at a set price, worth nothing unless the shares exceed it, and exercising may cost real money and trigger tax on a gain you cannot sell to pay for. Private shares have no market at all: the valuation in the offer is an internal number, and turning it into cash requires an event nobody can schedule.
None of which means equity is bad — it is how a great deal of wealth gets created. It means a valuation in an offer letter is not comparable, unit for unit, with salary, and treating the two as interchangeable is how people end up surprised. How asset classes work covers the risk side of holding a concentrated position, which is what employer equity always is.
Salary is 68.4% of what employers spend. Comparing on it alone ignores a third of the package, and the ignored third differs between employers far more than salaries do — matches range from nothing to double digits, premiums from nominal to hundreds a month.
It is an annualised figure that assumes you stay through the vesting schedule, hit every bonus target, and that the equity is worth what the letter says. Each of those is a condition. The parts of it that survive all three conditions are the parts worth comparing.
Sometimes more, often less. A health plan is worth a great deal to someone who needs it and its full cost is still spent on someone who does not. Insurance you would never have bought is worth less to you than its price; a match is worth exactly its price. Value them by your own use, not the employer's invoice.
Salary is often the most constrained line, because it sits in a band tied to a level. Signing bonuses, start dates, equity refreshes and the vesting schedule frequently have more give in them, and they are worth real money — a one-year cliff waived is not a small concession.
The BLS split is a national average across all civilian workers and industries, so it describes the scale of the gap rather than your own package. The modelled figures use this site's own paycheck and offer code and can be reproduced in the job offer comparison.
Nothing is saved or sent anywhere; this just checks your answers in the page itself.
The BLS split is a national average across every industry and occupation and will not match your own package; it establishes the scale of what salary leaves out, not your number. Equity treatment, vesting schedules and plan rules are set by each employer and vary widely, and the tax treatment of equity in particular is genuinely complicated and worth professional advice. This page is general information, not financial, tax or legal advice.