Loading Internship Offer Comparison…
Both offers are totalled over the whole engagement — every paid week and every unpaid one — because an unpaid training fortnight is still a fortnight of your summer. Enter both in the same currency.
Training or onboarding you are asked to attend for nothing.
Your figure, not ours. Nothing here knows any tax code.
Leave at nothing if the employer houses you.
Training or onboarding you are asked to attend for nothing.
Your figure, not ours. Nothing here knows any tax code.
Leave at nothing if the employer houses you.
Give each offer a pay rate and a number of paid weeks — and hours a week, if the pay is quoted hourly.
The offer that pays more is the offer that pays more. What the work is, who you would learn from, whether the team converts interns into graduate hires and whether the name on it opens a door later are worth a great deal and appear nowhere in this arithmetic. Treat the money as one input to the decision, and the smaller number as affordable rather than as wrong.
A monthly rate is spread at 4.333 weeks to the month, which is a year divided by twelve rather than any particular month. Where an offer states a total for the whole placement, choose that basis instead and no conversion happens at all.
A student holding two internship offers is usually holding two numbers that cannot be laid against each other. One quotes an hourly rate, one a monthly salary. One runs eight weeks, one runs twelve. One puts you in company accommodation and one leaves you to sign a summer lease in a city you have never lived in. The rates can differ by a fifth and mean nothing, because the rate is a price per unit of something the two offers do not share.
This page converts whatever each employer quoted into one figure: the money that is still yours when the placement ends. Everything that reduces it is entered as its own line, so the winner is never a bare verdict — it comes with the reason attached and the reason can be argued with.
Rent is the largest and the least visible. An employer providing housing has effectively raised your pay by whatever a room near that office costs, and no salary column will ever show it. Entering nothing in the housing box for a placement that houses you, and a real weekly figure for one that does not, is what makes the two offers finally comparable.
Getting there is next: flights or a long drive, a deposit, a fortnight of overlapping rent at both ends. Then deductions, which are yours to supply — no tax code is built into this page and none is looked up, so leaving that box empty means every figure on the page is a pre-tax figure and the page labels it that way rather than quietly presenting it as take-home.
An unpaid training block, an onboarding fortnight, a required orientation: each is time you cannot spend elsewhere and none of it appears in a salary. Counting those weeks in the denominator is what stops a nine-week commitment paying for seven from outscoring a straightforward eight-week job at a lower rate.
It also drives the one refusal built into this comparison. Where the two placements occupy different amounts of your summer, their totals are answers to different questions and are not ranked against one another. The page switches to what a single week of your time is worth, says that it has done so, and itemises the difference in those same weekly units. The offer that ends sooner also hands back weeks that the other one takes, and what you would do with them is not something arithmetic can price.
The better-paid placement is the better-paid placement, and that is the entire claim being made. What the work actually is, who you would sit next to, whether the team has ever converted an intern into a graduate hire, whether anybody will remember your name in October and how the employer reads on a CV two years later are all absent here, and any one of them can be worth more than the gap between the two totals.
Treat a smaller number as affordable or not affordable rather than as right or wrong. The useful output is not a winner: it is knowing that the difference is four hundred rather than four thousand, which changes how much weight the money should carry against everything else on the list.
A year is divided by twelve, which puts a shade over four and a third weeks in a month. No calendar month is really that length, so where an employer states a single figure for the entire placement, choosing that basis avoids the conversion altogether.
Whatever your own circumstances produce, from a payslip, a previous placement or a payroll office. This page holds no tax tables and consults nothing external, so any number here is yours; a wrong one is still better than pretending deductions do not exist.
Not as income on this page. It appears instead as a housing cost of nothing, which produces the same total while keeping the line honest about what happened. Whether it is taxable where you are is a question for the payroll office rather than for arithmetic.
Because the total depends on hours, weeks, rent and travel as well as the rate, and any of those can be larger than the gap between two rates. The itemised difference shows exactly which line overturned it, which is usually accommodation or a flight.
Then the money genuinely is not the deciding factor, which is a useful result rather than a failed calculation. Everything the page cannot see becomes the whole basis of the decision, and you can stop weighing two figures that turned out to be one figure.