You have two offers and one pays noticeably more. How do you decide between them?

Get the two numbers into the same units first

Most offer comparisons are decided badly because the two headline figures are not measuring the same thing. Before you can have an opinion, rebuild both offers as a single annual figure with its components separated by how certain they are.

Fixed base is the only line you can treat as money. It is what your notice-period payout, your loan eligibility and next year's percentage raise are all computed from, so a package that reaches a big total by keeping base low is structurally weaker even when the totals match.

The bonus is a target, not a payment. Ask what percentage of target the team paid out in each of the last two cycles, whether the first year is prorated by joining date, and whether you receive anything if you resign before the payout month. A thirty percent target that historically pays at seventy percent of target is worth twenty-one percent, and you should write it into your comparison at twenty-one.

Retirement contributions and benefits are small per line and occasionally decisive in aggregate. What matters is the employer's contribution rather than the deduction from your own pay, whether that contribution vests immediately or after a service period, and what insurance actually covers — sum insured, whether parents and in-laws are included, and whether pre-existing conditions are waived. If one offer covers a dependant that the other does not, price the difference and add it to that side.

Equity, and what a private valuation means

Equity is where the arithmetic usually breaks. Establish four things: whether the quoted figure is the whole grant or a per-year figure, the vesting schedule and cliff, whether it is restricted stock or options with an exercise price, and how the per-share value was set.

A grant quoted as a single impressive number over a four-year vest with a one-year cliff is a per-year number divided by four, with none of it yours until month twelve. If you leave at month eleven you leave with nothing. Options add a second condition: you have to pay the exercise price to own anything, and the window to do so after you leave is often short, so vested options can quietly expire unexercised.

For a private company, the price attached to your grant is an internally determined valuation, not a market price. Nobody is offering to buy your shares at it. Investors typically hold preferred shares with a liquidation preference, meaning they are paid out before common shareholders in a sale, so in a flat or modest exit common stock can return far less than the headline valuation implies and sometimes nothing. Ask what the last round's price and date were, whether there is any secondary or buyback programme that employees have actually used, and what the preference stack looks like. If the answers are vague, that is your answer about how to weight the line.

So a listed company's shares and a Series-B startup's shares should not enter the comparison at face value. Suppose offer A is 100 units of base plus 20 units a year of liquid listed stock, and offer B is 90 units of base plus 40 units a year of private paper. Treated at face value B wins by 10. Discount the private equity to a quarter of its stated value, which is a judgement rather than a formula, and A wins by 20. The point is not the specific discount you choose. It is that you chose one deliberately and can defend it.

What dominates by year two

Having done the arithmetic, be honest that it is not the whole decision. Over a two-to-three-year horizon four things move your total earnings and your satisfaction more than the gap you just measured.

The work itself: what you will be building, how much of your week goes to it versus to coordination overhead, and whether the technical problems are ones you want to be better at. The manager: whether the person you will report to has grown people into the next level, and whether the conversation you had with them felt like a conversation or an audit. The trajectory: whether the role has visible scope above it, how promotions actually happen there, and whether the company is growing fast enough to create room. And stability: runway and funding stage for a private company, recent layoffs, the state of the business line you are joining rather than the company overall.

Trajectory is the one that quietly settles the money question too. A role where you reach the next level in two years usually out-earns a higher-paying role where you plateau, which is why a modest pay gap is worth trading for a clearly steeper slope — and why a large one usually is not.

The pay gap is a legitimate reason

You do not need a nobler justification than the number. If one offer meaningfully changes what you can save, support or stop worrying about, that is a real improvement in your life and interviewers who ask this question are not looking for you to pretend otherwise. What they are listening for is whether you can hold both things at once: that you took the money seriously enough to compute it properly, and that you did not let a larger number stop you from asking whether the job is any good.

The answer that reads badly is either extreme. Choosing purely on total compensation with no view on the work suggests you will leave for the next bidder, which is expensive for them. Claiming money is irrelevant to you is not believed, and it also makes you look like someone who will be resentful in eighteen months.

What to ask before you sign

Ask the hiring manager who you will report to and whether that is settled, what the first six months are expected to produce, what happened to the last person in the role or why the role is new, and how the team's headcount has moved in the past year. Ask HR for the written breakup of the package, the bonus payout history, the vesting schedule in writing, the notice period, and any bond, clawback or joining-bonus recovery clause.

Then ask for one conversation with a peer on the team without the manager present. What you are testing is whether the answers you were given hold up when they are not being given by someone who is selling. If a company will not arrange that, note it and weigh it.

Asking for time

Asking for time is routine, and the way to keep it comfortable is to be specific and to make clear you are not shopping the offer indefinitely.

"Thank you — I am genuinely keen on this. I have one other process concluding on the fourteenth, and I want to make this decision properly rather than quickly. Could I come back to you by the fifteenth? If it helps, I am happy to answer anything that would make the decision easier on your side."

Name a date rather than asking for "a few days", because a date is something a recruiter can plan around and defend internally. If the other process is slower than the deadline you were given, tell the slower company you have an offer in hand with a date and ask whether they can compress; that is a normal request and it frequently works. And if a deadline is genuinely immovable and short, treat the pressure itself as information about how the company negotiates.

Once you decide, decline the other offer within a day, by phone or a short direct message, without inventing a reason. You are likely to meet these people again.