When two job offers land at the same time, it's tempting to just compare the salary line and pick the higher number. That's usually a mistake. A 401(k) match is real money your employer adds on top of your pay. Health insurance premiums come straight out of your paycheck every single month whether or not the offer letter mentions them. Once you add those in, the offer with the smaller salary can easily come out ahead.
A real comparison: two offers, same person
Here's a worked example using the exact inputs from the job offer compare calculator.
Offer A: $62,000 salary, no 401(k) match, $120/month health insurance premium, no bonus.
Offer B: $60,000 salary, a 4% 401(k) match, $0/month health premium (fully covered), no bonus.
On salary alone, Offer A wins by $2,000 a year. But work through the real numbers: Offer A's $120/month health premium costs $1,440 a year out of pocket, bringing its true value down to $60,560. Offer B's 4% match on a $60,000 salary is worth $2,400 a year in employer money, and there's no health premium to subtract, so its true value comes out to $62,400.
Even though Offer B's salary is $2,000 lower on paper, it's actually worth about $1,840 more per year once the match and health costs are counted. That's the entire point of running this math before accepting an offer: the number on the letter and the number in your actual financial life are frequently not the same number.
The formula behind it
The math here is straightforward addition and subtraction: true yearly value equals salary, plus 401(k) match dollars, minus yearly health premium, minus yearly commute cost, plus any bonus. The one assumption baked in is that you contribute enough yourself to receive the full employer match, which is how most matching plans work (commonly something like "100% match up to 4% of salary"). If you don't plan to contribute that much yourself, lower the match percentage you enter on the calculator to reflect what you'd actually receive.
What to add for your own comparison
Beyond salary, match and health premiums, the calculator also has a field for commute cost, meant for out-of-pocket dollars like gas, tolls, parking or a transit pass, not the value of your time. If one job adds a meaningful commute cost that the other doesn't, that's real money leaving your pocket every month and it belongs in the comparison. A signing bonus or annual bonus also has a field, since a guaranteed bonus is money you can count the same way as salary.
What this kind of comparison can't tell you
Dollar math can't weigh everything that matters in a job decision. Paid time off, remote work flexibility, equity or stock options, retirement vesting schedules, how much you'll actually learn, and whether you like the people you'd be working with, none of that has a clean dollar value this kind of calculator can assign. What it's good for is making sure the dollar parts of the decision, which are usually the easiest to measure, actually get measured correctly instead of being reduced to "which number is bigger."
It's also worth remembering this compares gross value, not take-home pay. No taxes are modeled on the salary, match or bonus here, this is a side-by-side comparison of what each offer is worth before tax, which is the fair way to compare offers since both would be taxed similarly at similar income levels.
When the higher salary really does win
This math doesn't always flip the result. If both offers have similar match percentages and similar health premiums, the higher salary usually stays the better offer, because there's nothing large enough on the other side of the ledger to close the gap. The flip happens specifically when one offer is unusually generous on match or benefits while the other is light on both, which is a more common situation than people expect, since companies often compete on salary headline numbers while being quieter about benefits.
It's worth running the numbers even when you're fairly confident the higher salary will still win. Knowing the actual size of the gap, not just the direction, matters if you're using one offer to negotiate the other. "Your offer is about $1,840 a year better once I account for the match and premiums" is a much stronger, more specific thing to say to a recruiter than "the other offer pays more."
A quick checklist before you run the numbers
Gather four things for each offer before you sit down with the calculator: the base salary, the 401(k) match formula (written as a percentage of salary, assuming you contribute enough to get the full match), your monthly share of the health insurance premium, and any guaranteed bonus. If an offer's match is described differently, like "50 cents per dollar up to 6%," convert it to an equivalent effective percentage of salary before entering it, so you're comparing apples to apples between offers that structure their match differently.
The takeaway
A $2,000 salary gap can completely flip once a 401(k) match and a health insurance premium are added to the picture, the same way it did in the example above. Before you accept (or decline) an offer based on the salary number alone, run both offers through the job offer compare calculator with your real numbers for match, premiums, commute and bonus, and see what each offer is actually worth.
This is an educational estimate, not financial advice. See the disclaimer for more.
More money math in my book. Check out Money Math for Your 20s.