If your current employer matched this offer, would you stay?

The question is a retention-risk check

The interviewer is not curious about your finances. They are estimating the chance that they run a full loop, get an offer approved, and then lose you in the week you resign, which is a common and expensive failure and one they can partly predict from this answer. A candidate whose only reason for moving is pay is the candidate most likely to be bought back, so a hedged answer here is scored as a risk even when it is honest.

That is why "it would depend on the number" is the weakest available answer despite being the most truthful for many people. It tells the interviewer the process may be a rehearsal for a raise where you already work. It also quietly weakens your own negotiating position later, because you have suggested that a match to your current employer's ceiling is roughly what it takes to move you.

What a strong answer sounds like

Say no, then justify the no with something structural rather than emotional, and stop.

"No. Money is part of why I am looking, but the reason I would leave even at the same pay is that the platform work I want to do does not exist on my team — I asked about moving twice and there is no headcount for it. Matching the number does not change what I would be working on next year."

Three things make that work. It is unambiguous. The reason it gives is specific enough to be checkable, and it names an attempt you already made, which converts a complaint into a considered decision. And it never mentions what figure would tempt you.

If your reason genuinely is only money, you still have a better answer than "it depends". Money problems have structure: a band that does not move, a cycle that pays once a year, a title that caps your range, a market rate you have documented. "They have told me the band tops out below what this role pays, so a match this year still leaves me having the same conversation next year" is an honest, decisive answer built entirely out of pay.

When the counteroffer actually arrives

The interview answer is one thing; being handed a real counteroffer on the day you resign is another, and it is the harder problem because it arrives with relief attached. No new commute, no new colleagues, no probation, no first ninety days of proving yourself, and a number that has suddenly moved after two years of not moving.

Work through it with the same discipline you would apply to any offer, on four questions.

What is actually changing, in writing? Money, or the role, the manager, the scope, the level? If the answer is only money, you have solved the one thing that was easiest to solve and left the reason you started looking untouched. That is the most common shape a counteroffer takes and the most common reason people who accept one are looking again within the year.

Why is it available now? A raise that could be approved in forty-eight hours under pressure could have been approved in the previous review cycle and was not. That is not proof of bad faith — budgets are genuinely lumpier than they appear from below — but it is information about how your value is priced there. Ask yourself whether you want to have to resign again to get the next one.

What happens to trust? You cannot control how a manager reacts to a resignation, and the reactions vary enormously: some are entirely gracious and some quietly reclassify you. Assume nothing either way, but assume the information travels. Practically, this means you should not resign as a negotiating tactic. Resign when you have decided to go.

What does the arithmetic say once you strip out the pressure? Here it helps to invent no figures and use only the ones in front of you. Suppose the external offer is 100 units of base and the counteroffer is 105 units, but the counteroffer is delivered as a one-off retention bonus repayable if you leave within a year rather than as base pay. Then your recurring pay has not changed at all, next year's percentage rise computes off the old base, and you have accepted a twelve-month constraint on your next move. Written as two lines on a page, that is a different decision from the one it feels like in the room.

Whether to tell your employer you are looking

Generally not, and certainly not as leverage. The exception is a manager you trust and a problem they can genuinely fix, where raising it as a problem — not as a threat, and before you have an offer — is the sequence that occasionally produces a real change. Once an offer is in your hand, that conversation has become a negotiation whether you intended it or not.

Anything involving your notice period, garden leave, or clauses in your contract depends on your jurisdiction and on the agreement you signed, and those vary more than candidates expect. If money or timing turns on such a clause, read the contract and get advice on it rather than relying on what a colleague experienced.

The version of this that fails in the interview

Two failures, and both come from treating the question as an invitation to negotiate. The first is naming a number: "well, if they came back with X, I would have to think about it" hands the interviewer both your reservation price and your uncertainty in one sentence. The second is being visibly delighted by the question, because it reads as though you have been waiting for exactly this leverage.

The interviewer is also listening to how you talk about the employer you are about to leave. A confident no that stays warm about your current team — a decision about direction rather than a verdict on people — is what separates a candidate who is moving on from a candidate who is escaping.