The One-Offer Total-Comp Figure, Graded Component by Component

You have one written offer in hand. Before you compare it to anything, counter it, or sign it, you need a single total-compensation number you can defend line by line. This guide is a definition of done for that number: a certainty-tiered, annualized, de-double-counted rubric that two people applying it to the same offer would grade the same pass or fail. It is not a broad "evaluate the offer" checklist that mixes pay in with culture and manager. It grades the figure itself.

The reason a standard matters here is that the offer was built by people who do this for a living, and you almost certainly cannot consult one. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, total-rewards specialists cluster at the director level: 39 at the Director band in the United States, and zero at the senior individual-contributor band in both the US and the UK. The people who designed your package outnumber the neutral experts you could ask. A self-grading rubric is how you close that gap.

What a complete total-comp figure must contain

A complete figure has two halves: direct pay and indirect value, and neither half is optional. Direct pay is base salary, target bonus, commission, and sign-on. Indirect value is employer insurance premiums, retirement match, equity, PTO where you count it, and allowances or stipends. A figure that stops at base salary is not a total-comp figure; for tech roles, base salary is only 50 to 70 percent of true total compensation.

The two taxonomies in wide use agree on the core and differ at the edges. Both count base, bonus, commission, equity, employer-funded benefits like a 401(k) match and health premium share, and remote stipends. The disputed line is PTO: some treat it as cash-equivalent, valued at your daily rate of annual salary divided by 260 workdays, and some do not. The rule is to decide once and state your choice, because the error is not counting PTO or omitting it, the error is being inconsistent.

The indirect half is not a rounding error. In a typical professional role, non-salary components add 20 to 50 percent to the value of a package. The federal data backs the scale and its consistency.

The certainty tiers: guaranteed, conditional, speculative

Every dollar in the offer belongs to exactly one of three tiers, and the tier decides whether and how you discount it. This is the single most important idea in the standard: a label is not enough, each tier must carry a discount or a reason it does not. Base salary and a signed sign-on are guaranteed. Target bonus and commission are conditional. Unvested private-company equity is speculative.

The reason the tiers exist is that "target" and "paper value" are marketing numbers. A 15 percent target bonus at one documented company paid out at 60 to 80 percent of target in most years. Counting the target at face value overstates expected cash by 20 to 40 percent. The fix is mechanical: ask for the last three years of actual payout as a percent of target, average it, and multiply.

Speculative equity is harder because there is no honest single value, only a discounted range. The 409A valuation sets the option strike price but not a market price, and the shares are illiquid, so you cannot sell them to find out what they are worth. Two defensible methods exist. The first is a flat risk discount: 70 to 90 percent off paper value, or equivalently a 0.25 to 0.5 multiplier for private-company equity. The second is probability-weighted: if there is a 25 percent chance of exit, multiply your projected after-tax value by 0.25, and that is your expected value. Either is acceptable. Counting options at the last preferred-round price is not.

Annualizing first-year items without inflating the number

Multi-year and one-time items must be converted to a steady-state annual figure, or they will quietly multiply your total. A four-year equity grant is annual pay divided by four, not four years of pay stacked into year one. A sign-on is a one-time item that belongs in a separate year-one line, not the recurring number.

The equity math is simple and the error is expensive. Divide the total grant value by the vesting period: a $40,000 grant over four years is $10,000 of annual compensation. Standard RSU schedules run four years with a one-year cliff, so you vest nothing for the first 12 months, 25 percent vests at month 12, and the remaining 75 percent vests monthly or quarterly over the following three years. Whatever the schedule, the annualized number is grant divided by vest years.

Sign-on bonuses need their own treatment because of clawbacks. Clawback periods usually run 12 months from your start date, sometimes on a declining scale where you owe less the longer you stay. That makes the sign-on conditional until the anniversary, not earned on day one. So year-one and steady-state are genuinely two different numbers: the sign-on and relocation appear in the year-one line, net of clawback exposure, and vanish from the recurring figure you use to compare offers.

Valuing the benefits line from source documents

The indirect half of the package has a documented dollar value, and each dollar must cite the document it came from. Read the employer 401(k) match from the plan document or benefits guide, the premium share from the Summary of Benefits and Coverage, the equity terms from the grant or award agreement, and the option strike price from the 409A report. If a benefit dollar has no source document behind it, it does not go in the figure.

The 409A is the anchor for options. The headline number from any 409A report is the per-share common-stock value, and that becomes the strike price on every option grant issued during the report's effective window, typically the next 12 months. A valuation is required at least annually or after a material event. For the retirement line, the most common Fidelity match formula is dollar-for-dollar on the first 3 percent of pay then 50 cents on the next 2 percent, an effective 4 percent of salary for anyone contributing at least 5 percent.

On a $120,000 base, a 4 percent effective match is $4,800 a year of real annual value, and that number belongs in the figure as surely as base does. The scale of the whole benefits wedge is consistent in the federal data, which gives you a sanity check: if your benefits line lands far outside roughly 30 percent of employer cost, re-read your source documents before you trust it.

Refolk writes your resume from your own history and tailors it to every posting, which is upstream of this work; by the time you are grading an offer you need the comp specialist's eye, and that is exactly the role that is hard to find.

The procedure, step by step

Run these seven steps in order. The sequence matters most between steps two and four, where the published sources disagree, so the order below is deliberate: tag, then discount, then annualize, so you never discount a number you have not yet tiered or annualize a number you have not yet discounted.

The whole run takes roughly two to three hours for a typical offer, most of it in the inventory step where you are hunting through documents. Sources disagree on the order of steps five and three: salary.com and qobra put "value benefits" before equity, and levelop.dev treats annualize-then-discount as one combined move. Any of these orders passes as long as you tag before you discount and annualize before you compare. What fails is reversing those two.

How the figure goes wrong

Most bad total-comp numbers fail for one of eight reasons, and each has a specific false positive and a specific check. This is the part of the standard that catches the expensive mistakes, so give it real weight. The single biggest error multiplier is equity: a named engineer documented comparing a startup's four-year equity number against a public company's one-year RSU vest, filing "$200K in options" next to "$50K per year in RSUs" as if they were the same kind of money. Annualize everything, discount for liquidity, then compare.

Two of these deserve a closer look. Mixed tax basis is the quietest: the moment you add a pre-tax base to an "after-tax" net figure, the total is meaningless, and nothing on the page flags it. Pre-tax is the better default for comparing two offers because taxes affect both offers similarly; the point is not which basis you pick but that you pick one. The clawback trap is the costliest in practice, because an offer that looks richer on sign-on can owe nearly all of it back if you leave inside the window, and withholding on equity compounds the surprise, since employers often withhold RSUs at the 22 percent federal supplemental rate, 37 percent above $1M, plus state and payroll taxes.

The grading checklist

Run this before you call the figure done. Every item is a pass/fail statement, not a topic, so two graders working from the same offer documents should tick the same boxes and reach the same verdict.

A figure that clears every item is one you can carry into a comparison, a counter, or an acceptance without the fear that it is quietly four times too high or 30 percent too low.

Keeping the figure current

A graded figure is a snapshot, and two inputs move after you build it: equity valuation and benefit limits. The 409A strike is good only for its effective window, typically 12 months or until a material event like a new financing round, so if your start date or your grant date sits on the far side of a raise, the strike you used may be stale. Re-check the effective date on the 409A report rather than trusting the number you were first quoted.

The benefit ceilings reset on a schedule too. The 2026 employee 401(k) deferral limit is $24,500, and the combined employee-plus-employer IRC section 415(c) limit is $72,000; these are the caps that bound how large the match line can honestly be. Rather than memorizing a value, memorize the mechanism: these limits are set annually, so confirm the current year's figures before you finalize the retirement line.

The last habit is the one the standard is built around. Because neutral comp experts are scarce and the people who designed your offer are not, the second-grader step is your real control. Hand the figure and the source documents to someone who will re-grade from scratch, and treat a disagreement as a defect in the figure, not a difference of opinion. When two readers reach the same pass, the number is done.