The Number on Your Grant Agreement Is Not the Number You’ll Receive

Most people anchor their “stay or leave” decision to the RSU grant value — the headline figure in their offer letter or equity portal. This calculator starts by correcting that number. Three things reliably reduce unvested equity before it reaches your account: ordinary income tax applied at vesting (not the lower capital gains rate most assume), movement in the stock price between grant and vesting, and performance or layoff risk that can eliminate unvested tranches entirely. This calculator applies a volatility discount of 0% for stable fixed bonuses, 20% for public tech equity, and 40% for pre-IPO or startup equity. A $120,000 RSU grant with medium volatility and a 32% tax rate produces a real expected value of approximately $65,000. The decision should be anchored to that number, not the grant figure.

What Today’s Cost Actually Measures

Today’s Cost combines two daily figures: the salary gap between your current role and the best available market offer (the unrealized earning potential per working day), plus the imputed cost of unpaid overtime, priced at your nominal hourly rate. If the best offer matches your current salary and you work no extra hours, today’s cost is zero — staying is financially neutral on this dimension. The number becomes meaningful when either the market has moved ahead of your current compensation, or when uncompensated overtime represents a significant hidden cost.

Behind the Freedom Score

The Freedom Score (0–100) measures how difficult leaving would actually be, not whether you should leave. It is built from four components. Emergency savings runway contributes up to 30 points — twelve months of runway scores the full 30. The salary gap ratio contributes up to 25 points inversely: a large gap between market pay and current salary reduces your score, because it raises the stakes of the decision. RSU lock-in — real equity value divided by annual salary — contributes up to 25 more points, also inversely. Overtime intensity contributes the remaining 20 points. A score above 70 indicates you can leave without meaningful financial disruption. Below 30 means the cost of leaving today is high enough that targeting a vesting milestone first makes financial sense.

The Moment Staying Stops Paying Off

The break-even calculation answers a simple question: how long does it take to recover what you forfeit by leaving now? The formula divides your real RSU loss (unvested equity after taxes and volatility discount) by the monthly financial gain from leaving — salary gap plus recovered overtime cost. If leaving today costs $65,000 in forfeited equity and gains $7,200 per month, the recovery period is approximately nine months. After that point, the financial case for having stayed evaporates. The break-even date is often much shorter than people expect, which is why seeing it as a concrete number changes the calculation.

When the Calculator Says Stay

This tool is not designed to push toward an exit. If your current salary exceeds the best available market offer, and the next vesting date is within a few months, the calculator will often show a negative opportunity cost and a high Freedom Score — a signal that the remaining wait is genuinely worthwhile. The Two Paths comparison will quantify exactly how much you gain by holding through the vesting date versus leaving now. The goal is to replace the indefinite internal negotiation with a specific, calculable answer.

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