Should I accept an RTO offer which appears to have a higher salary/wage?

Question: Should I accept an RTO offer which appears to have a higher salary/wage?

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Here's how to decide. We'll be using the take-home/costings/hourly method, as it's one of the simpler ones.

1) Take-home (net) pay.
Firstly, use the tax rates in your area (or the relevant current and potential jurisdictions if the offer will involving moving to somewhere with different tax rates), along with any other pay deductions which are likely to apply, to work out the difference between your actual take-home pay in your current job and the opportunity on offer.


2) Costings. There are a number of additional or increased costs to you as an employee in an RTO job. Some of them you can find listed at <https://imgur.com/a/when-competitors-offer-work-from-home-v4NxZMD>, including some you may not have considered. There are also hidden fees if you're moving from a fully WFH role to a non-fully-WFH or RTO role, such as whether you'll have to move to a higher-cost-of-living area in order to be able to physically attend a workplace. Remember: even if you'll only be working one day a week in the office, you'll need to be paying for seven days a week in a location near that office. HCOL areas also tend to have higher costs on a lot of things, not just what you'd be paying for rent or a mortgage. Deduct all the projected higher and additional costs in your personal and domestic budgets from your take-home-pay difference; this will give you a better idea of how much of the proposed income increase you'll actually be able to access for your own life.


3) Finally, look at the total hours involved in your current job vs the opportunity. How many hours do you need to work to meet your job requirements, currently? Not the official hours, but the number you find yourself putting in. It might be less than the official figure, it may be more if you find yourself doing overtime a lot.

The main factor in this last calculation is that RTO jobs have a lot of 'hidden' hours. Commuting - or any time you need to travel due to the job making it necessary, paid/recognized/offcial or not - takes time from you. Unpaid lunches take time from you. Basically, any minute you are not able to be at home or in a place of your choosing, doing things you want, that takes time from you. And yes, it does include time spent on RTO prep-work; managing things like drycleaning, buying dress shoes (and office wear) more often, driving to gas stations more often to fill up your car, acquiring and repeatedly applying personal grooming consumables that wouldn't be needed at home, hours at work when you're just trying to look busy, hours when you're interrupted at work for non-work-related items or anything which could have been an email, etc. (In all fairness, this _can_ apply to some WFH jobs as well, if you're expected to be on camera or instantly available via computer-chat interfaces for long periods.)

Now, add up all those hours you would need to pour out of your life, in total, for each job. Again; it's not the number of hours written down in a contract or employee handbook, or what HR officially recognizes. It's the number of hours it would cost YOU in a week or month. (Or even a year, if there are corporate events you're expected to attend, or similar situations. Yearly calculations also allow you to factor in vacations and public holidays, for a more accurate figure.)



Finally, we're now able to compare the two incomes directly. For each job, take the accessible-to-YOU pay from the end of part (2) above, and divide it by the number of hours from the end of part (3). This will give you the true rate-per-hour that you, personally, will see from each job after everything else is stripped away.

And now you can ask yourself accurately: Would the new income be worth it, to you?