What is the offer actually worth?
A four-year equity grant added to one year's salary is not a number you can compare with anything. This divides it properly and keeps the guaranteed money visible.
What the offer is actually worth a year
Equity divided across its vesting period, not counted at face value — and the guaranteed money kept visibly separate from the rest.
The components
How this is calculated
Bonus is a percentage of base. Pension is a percentage of base. Equity is the total grant divided by its vesting period. Sign-on is divided by the years you choose to spread it over.
Equity is annualised on purpose. A headline that adds a four-year grant to one year's salary is not comparable to anything, and it is how offers are routinely made to look larger than they are.
Components are never blended into certainty. Base and pension are contractual; a bonus depends on performance and company results; equity depends on a future valuation. The total is useful and the breakdown is what you negotiate against.
Gross figures. No take-home estimate.
The four-year trick
An offer quoting "total compensation of 285,000" by adding a full four-year equity grant to one year of salary is describing something that does not exist. The same grant divided across its vesting period is 45,000 a year, and that is the number comparable to another offer.
This is not always deliberate. It is, however, always worth undoing before comparing anything.
Equity is a valuation, not money
For a public company it is a share price that will be different when the shares vest. For a private one there is no market price at all — the figure in the letter is an internal valuation, and the outcomes range from life-changing to nothing.
None of that makes equity bad. It makes it a different kind of thing from salary, which is why it stays itemised rather than folded into one number.
Look at the guaranteed line
Base plus pension is what arrives regardless of performance, company results or a future valuation. On some offers that is most of the package and on others it is barely half.
Two offers with the same headline can differ enormously here, and it is the single most useful comparison to make before deciding which one you would rather be holding in a bad year.