Salary is the number people quote. Total compensation is what the employer actually spends and what the employee actually receives, and the gap between them is usually large. Every number on this page is calculated in your browser and never leaves your device.
Paid time off is already inside the salary. The employee is paid for those days out of the same annual figure, so adding a separate dollar value for them on top of salary counts the same money twice. Total rewards statements do this constantly and it is the fastest way to lose an employee's trust in the whole document. The figure is here so you know what those days cost, not so you can add it.
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Formula used
Total Compensation = Base Salary + Bonus + Employer Medical + Employer Retirement + Other Employer Paid + Employer Taxes
Multiple of Base = Total Compensation ÷ Base Salary
Benefits Load = (Total Compensation - Base Salary - Bonus) ÷ Base Salary × 100
Value of Paid Time Off = (Base Salary ÷ Work Days in Year) × PTO Days
Optional fields left blank are treated as zero. The value of paid time off is calculated on its own line and displayed on its own, and it is never added into total compensation, because those days are already paid out of base salary. Benefits load deliberately excludes bonus, so it measures employer paid benefits and taxes against base salary rather than against cash.
Employer payroll taxes are a real cost to the employer, but employees rarely read them as value they received. If you are building a statement the employee will see, decide deliberately whether that line belongs in it, and label it as employer cost rather than as pay.
A total compensation figure is only credible if every component is a number you can produce on request. Do not populate a statement with estimates and then hand it to an employee who will ask where the medical figure came from.
Those days are already paid out of the same annual salary, so counting them again inflates the total. It also gives the employee a fair reason to distrust every other line on the statement.
A target is a plan, not a payment. If you are showing an employee what they received, use what they received. If you are modeling cost, label the figure as a target so nobody reads it as history.
The employee pays part of the premium out of their own pay. Only the employer share is an employer cost, and only the employer share is value the employee did not fund themselves.
Employer taxes are a real cost and they can belong in the number. What cannot happen is including them silently, because an employee who works out what happened will assume the rest of the document is doing the same thing.
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