Career Change Financial Impact Calculator

What the comparison shows

Leaving a 60,000 role for a 50,000 one, with six months of no income and 10,000 of retraining, comes to 140,000 behind over ten years. The parts are visible on the card: 10,000 a year of salary difference across ten years, 30,000 of income forgone during the gap, and the 10,000 spent to make the move. The gap and the costs are one-off; the salary difference repeats every year, which is why it dominates a long comparison.

Reading it the other way round

Run it the other way and the same structure gives a payback period. A move from 60,000 to 70,000 with the same six-month gap and the same 10,000 of costs carries 40,000 of upfront damage against 10,000 a year of gain, so it breaks even after four years and shows a 60,000 net gain over ten. Narrow the raise to 65,000 and break-even stretches to eight years, which is most of the comparison window.

The flat-salary assumption

Both salaries are held flat, and that is the assumption most likely to mislead. A career with a steeper trajectory looks worse here than it should, because the model gives it no growth at all. The workaround is to enter a realistic figure for the year the comparison ends rather than a starting salary, on both sides, and read the result as a comparison of two plateaus rather than two curves.

There is a second thing the flat model misses. Earnings after a break do not always resume where they left off. Research on workers displaced during the Great Recession, using linked employer and employee data from a single US state, found their losses came mainly from hourly wage rates dropping at the point of displacement and then recovering sluggishly, with the loss of valuable specific worker and employer matches explaining more than half of the wage losses. That is involuntary job loss rather than a chosen career change, and one labour market rather than all of them, but the mechanism is the same one: the value built up inside a particular role and employer does not transfer with the person.

Where the salary figures come from

Salary figures are the other input worth care, and they are country-specific in a way that a generic range is not. Wage levels, wage growth and wage inequality all differ by country, which the ILO's Global Wage Report series examines. A figure quoted for one country's version of a role says little about another's, so both salaries entered are drawn from the market being worked in.

Pensions, hours and the parts outside the model

Pension arrangements move differently again. Where a scheme's value is tied to salary and service with one employer, leaving can freeze that entitlement at the salary on the day of departure, and what is offered to move the value elsewhere may not reflect what is being left behind. Where the pot belongs to the individual, it travels. A gap in contributions costs more than the contributions themselves, and when the gap falls matters as much as how long it lasts: at a 5% return, missing one year out of thirty costs about 6% of the final pot if it falls at the start, about 3% mid-career and under 2% near the end. Two years roughly doubles each of those.

Age changes the arithmetic without changing the formula. A shorter horizon means fewer years for a salary difference to repeat, so the same upfront cost has less time to be recovered. A move that breaks even in four years is a different proposition at 30 than at 60, and the calculator shows that directly: shorten the comparison window and watch the net figure move.

Hours are not in the model either. A change from a seventy-hour week to a forty-hour week returns about 1,560 hours a year, which is a real part of the trade and appears nowhere in a salary comparison.

What the calculator leaves out

• Growth on either path, since both salaries are held flat
• Pension entitlements, employer contributions and anything frozen by leaving
• Tax, which changes with income and differs by country
• Hours worked, and every non-financial part of the trade
• Whether the new role is obtainable, and how long it actually takes to land
• The chance that either salary turns out different from the figure entered

For educational illustration only

This calculator compares two flat salaries over a chosen number of years, subtracts the income forgone during a gap and the cost of making the move, and reports the difference. It takes both salaries as given and tests nothing about whether either is achievable. The output is one arithmetic scenario, and the non-financial side of the decision sits entirely outside it.