Guide · Comparing offers
Remote or office? How to compare two job offers
Two offers arrive with the same salary. One is fully remote; the other wants you at a desk five days a week. On paper they’re identical. Per hour of your life, they’re not even close.
Why salary is the wrong number to compare
A salary measures what an employer pays for the hours in your contract. It ignores two things that change from job to job:
- What the job costs you to do. Fares or fuel, parking, lunches near the office, work clothes. These come out of your take-home pay before you’ve spent anything on yourself.
- The hours it takes but doesn’t pay for. Commuting is the biggest. An hour on a train is an hour of your day that the job uses, whether or not it appears on a timesheet.
Divide what you actually keep by every hour the job really takes, and you get its real hourly wage. That’s the number worth comparing.
A worked example: the same salary in New York
Take two offers in New York, both paying the typical local salary of $86,310 for 40 hours a week. One is a five-day office job reached by subway; the other is fully remote.
| Measure | Office, 5 days | Fully remote |
|---|---|---|
| Salary | $86,310 | $86,310 |
| Job costs a year | $4,680 | $1,040 |
| Net income | $57,895 | $61,535 |
| Hours a year, commuting included | 2,522 | 2,080 |
| Real hourly wage | $22.96 | $29.58 |
The remote job leaves more money in your pocket and takes 442 hours fewer a year, roughly 55 eight-hour days. Same salary, very different deal.
The number to negotiate with: the break-even salary
If the office job is the one you want, the useful question is how much it would have to pay to match the remote offer per hour. That’s its break-even salary:
Break-even salary = (real hourly wage to match × hours the job takes + its yearly job costs) ÷ (1 − tax rate)
In the New York example, the office job would need to pay about $109,367, which is $23,057 (27%) more than the remote offer, just to break even. That’s a concrete figure to ask for. If the employer can’t move on salary, ask about fewer office days instead: at two days a week, the same job pays $26.62 an hour.
The formula uses one effective tax rate. Extra salary is taxed at your marginal rate, so the true break-even is a little higher. The calculator shows this figure automatically when you compare two jobs.
A checklist for comparing two offers
- Salary and any bonus you can reasonably count on.
- Your effective tax rate for each salary. If the salaries differ a lot, so will the rates.
- Door-to-door commute time, both ways, at the hours you’d actually travel. Check a map at rush hour rather than guessing.
- Commuting costs: fares, fuel, tolls and parking per day.
- The office days actually expected, which may not match the official policy. Ask people who work there.
- Unpaid overtime you can realistically expect. Again, ask current employees.
- Job-only spending: lunches, clothes, childcare you otherwise wouldn’t need.
- Benefits outside the salary, such as pension matching or health cover. Add their cash value to the salary so the comparison is fair.
What the real hourly wage doesn’t tell you
A higher real wage doesn’t automatically make a job the better choice. Some people work better around colleagues, and some careers move faster in an office. A commute can be reading time, or the only quiet part of the day. Use the number to see the trade clearly, then decide what it’s worth to you.