What the calculator does with your baseline

You enter your current salary and the raise you’d normally get for staying, and the calculator compounds that baseline every year instead of treating it as flat. Left at their pre-filled defaults – a $75,000 salary growing 3.6% a year – that path adds up to about $402,990 over five years, and that running total is the number the new-job path actually has to beat.

What the calculator does with your offer

The percentage you set for the switch turns into a full new salary path rather than a one-time bump: a 10% increase on the default salary starts the new job at $82,500, then that number grows on its own at whatever ongoing raise rate you set, since once you’ve switched, you’re a stayer there too and subject to that company’s own raise pattern going forward.

What the calculator does with what you’d give up

Before the two paths are compared, the calculator subtracts anything you’d forfeit by leaving – unvested pay, unpaid weeks between jobs, and one-time moving costs – straight out of the new path. At the default two-week gap alone, that is about $2,885 pulled from the switch path before it ever gets compared to staying.

What the break-even result is measuring

Rather than only reporting which total ends up larger, the result names the specific month the switching path catches up to the staying path. At the calculator’s defaults, that crossover happens in month 5 and the two paths finish five years apart by $37,414 – a very different read than a raw percentage difference on day one.

What the minimum-salary result is solving for

This result works backward from your horizon instead of forward from an offer: at the defaults, it shows that a new job would only need to pay about $75,500 – just a 0.7% bump – to fully match five years of staying, once the small default gap cost is accounted for.

What the timing options are comparing

Moving the switch date later trades one more year of your current raise for one fewer year of the new salary compounding. At the defaults, waiting a single year turns a $37,414 advantage into $29,914 – a $7,500 price tag on that one year of hesitation, with your switching costs held fixed across every option.

What the map is actually plotting

The grid runs your loyalty raise against your switching offer, colors every combination by which path wins, and marks exactly where your own numbers currently sit – moving either slider moves that point, and crossing from one colored zone into another is the precise moment the math flips from one answer to the other.