PTO Value Calculator

Meet Tom. He earns $75,000 a year and gets 15 days of paid time off. He thinks of those days as a nice perk, a vague "benefit" that doesn't show up on his pay stub. So last year he used 9 of them and let the other 6 quietly expire under a use-it-or-lose-it policy. He never did the math on what that cost him.

Here's the math they don't put in the handbook. Tom's daily rate is his salary divided by about 260 working days, which comes to roughly $288 a day. His full 15 days of PTO are therefore worth about $4,327 in compensation; it's salary he earns whether he's at his desk or on a beach. The 6 days he let evaporate? That's $1,731 he worked for and simply gave back to his employer.

Now flip it around. Tom's total PTO of 15 days represents an extra 5.8% on top of his base salary when you express it as paid days off. A coworker at the same $75,000 with 25 days of PTO is effectively earning the equivalent of a $2,885 raise in time, even though their salaries match exactly.

This is why PTO is one of the most undervalued lines in any compensation package. People obsess over a $2,000 salary difference between two offers while ignoring a 10-day PTO gap that's worth nearly $3,000 a year, plus the actual rest. And unused days are pure loss: time you earned, converted to nothing.

This calculator turns your PTO from a fuzzy perk into a hard number. Enter your salary and how many days you get, and it shows the dollar value of your full allotment, the per-day value, and what any unused days are costing you. Use it to compare offers honestly, to decide whether that conference is worth a vacation day, or simply to remind yourself that the days you don't take are money you don't keep.