Comparing a job offer abroad: the questions that decide it

The instinct when weighing a job offer in another country is to convert both salaries into one currency and compare. That calculation is easy, immediate, and close to meaningless. Below are the questions that actually move the answer, ordered by how much money is typically at stake.

Money

1. What is the offer net, not gross?

Effective deduction rates vary by tens of percentage points between countries, and the ranking by gross pay and the ranking by take-home pay are frequently different rankings. Run both offers through the relevant country calculators before comparing anything else. This is the single largest correction you will make.

2. Is the salary paid twelve times or more?

Spain, Portugal, Greece and Austria commonly pay fourteen or thirteen times a year. A monthly figure from a fourteen-payment country is not comparable to a monthly figure from a twelve-payment one: fourteen payments are about seventeen percent more than twelve of the same amount. Always convert both to annual before comparing.

3. How many hours is full time?

Standard weeks in our dataset range from 35 hours in France to 48 across much of Asia, Africa and the Gulf. The same annual salary can represent hourly rates that differ by a third. The detail is in the guide to working hours.

4. What does housing cost where you would actually live?

For most people this is the largest single expense and the largest source of variation between cities. It also swamps consumption tax differences: rent is exempt from or outside the scope of VAT in most systems, so a ten point VAT gap matters far less than a thirty percent rent gap. Compare cities, not countries.

5. What is not covered that currently is?

Healthcare, childcare, university tuition and public transport are heavily subsidised in some countries and largely private in others. A higher net salary that has to fund private health insurance and childcare may be a worse offer in cash terms, not just in convenience.

Entitlements

6. Does your contribution history carry over?

Within the EU and EEA, social security periods are aggregated across member states. Elsewhere it depends on whether a bilateral agreement exists between the two countries. Where none does, years of pension contributions can simply stop counting toward anything. What social contributions buy covers this in more detail, including vesting thresholds.

7. How much statutory leave, and how many public holidays?

Statutory annual leave varies from around ten days to thirty or more, and public holidays from under ten to over fifteen. Twenty extra days off is about eight percent of a working year, which is a raise most people would notice if it appeared in the salary line instead. Compare on the public holidays page.

8. What is the notice period and severance regime?

This ranges from at-will employment with no statutory severance to multi-month notice with substantial redundancy entitlements. It is worth real money and is rarely discussed during negotiation.

Tax residency

9. When do you become tax resident, and where are you resident now?

Most countries treat you as resident after a threshold number of days, commonly 183, but the tests usually include a permanent-home or centre-of-interests criterion that can trigger earlier. Moving mid-year frequently means part-year residency in two countries at once.

10. Is there a treaty, and is there an expat regime?

Double tax treaties determine which country taxes what and prevent the same income being taxed twice, but they do not always mean you pay the lower of the two rates. Separately, a number of countries operate temporary favourable regimes for inbound skilled workers, with a fixed reduced rate or a partial exemption for a limited number of years. Where one applies, it can dominate every other item on this list, and it is typically time-limited and requires an application.

11. What about the assets you leave behind?

Property, brokerage accounts, a pension in the old country, cryptocurrency. Some countries levy an exit tax on unrealised gains when you cease residency. Others tax worldwide income once you arrive, meaning rental income from your old flat becomes taxable in the new country. This is the item most often discovered too late.

A note on where to stop

Questions 1 through 8 you can answer yourself with public information, and the calculators here will get you most of the way through 1, 2, 3 and 7. Questions 9 through 11 are genuinely specialist. If the move is permanent, or you own property or hold significant assets, an hour with a cross-border tax adviser before you sign is cheap relative to what it prevents.

Nothing on this site is tax advice, and the figures are national-level estimates for a standard case rather than a calculation of your position. What they are good for is narrowing the field: working out which two offers are genuinely close, so the expensive advice can be spent on the decision that is actually difficult.

Useful next: the country-to-country comparison pages, and average versus median salary for reading local benchmarks without being misled by them.