Severance Package Analyzer Calculator

This calculator compares an actual severance offer against an industry-benchmark offer built from your years of service and role level, then expresses the gap as a 0-100 adequacy score. The benchmark assumes a weeks-per-year-of-service rate that rises with seniority — 1.5 weeks for individual contributors, 2 for managers, 3 for directors, 4 for VP and above — multiplied by your tenure, plus roughly two months of COBRA coverage per year of service (capped at 18 months) and a flat $5,000 assumed value for outplacement services. Your actual offer is built the same way from what you entered: cash severance (weekly pay times offered weeks), employer-paid COBRA months times monthly cost, and $5,000 if outplacement is included. The adequacy score is simply your offer's total value divided by the benchmark's, capped at 100 — so a score of 60 means the offer covers about 60% of what someone with your tenure and role would typically be offered.

Two things push past a simple offer-vs-benchmark comparison: unvested equity you'd forfeit by signing is tracked separately as a straight loss, and the calculator estimates a "true cost of signing" by adding that forfeited equity to a flat 25%-of-salary placeholder for the legal claims you give up when you sign a release — a rough stand-in for case strength that doesn't reflect any specific facts of your situation. The recommended counteroffer is the benchmark total plus half your unvested equity value, meant as a reasonable opening ask rather than a guaranteed number. Severance benchmarks vary enormously by industry, company size, and negotiating leverage, and "industry standard" is a loose convention, not a legal entitlement in most cases — use the adequacy score to sense whether an offer is thin, not as proof of what you're owed.