Salary Raise Case Builder

A raise is asked for — when it is asked for at all — without either side of the arithmetic.

The first figure is what the gap costs you. A salary is a rate rather than a payment, so a shortfall compounds across every year it goes unaddressed. On the figures this ships with, six thousand a year across five years is nearly thirty-two thousand, because the rise you did not get would have been raised too.

The second is the one that changes the conversation: what replacing you would cost. The recruiter’s fee, the weeks the job sits empty and has to be covered, the months before somebody new is up to speed, and the hours of other people’s time spent interviewing. On the same figures that comes to about four times the raise being asked for — one-off, against a rise that repeats.

That is not a threat, and the page says so in as many words. Used as one it stops being an argument and becomes a resignation nobody meant to hand in. It is the arithmetic the other side of the desk is already doing without saying so, and it is worth knowing which way it points.

Every figure is one you supply. It does not know what you are worth, what your market pays or what your employer can afford, and it will not produce a “market rate” out of nothing — that would be inventing the single most important number in the conversation. It does the two sums that can actually be done.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Save what you will ask for and what you would settle at, and look at both before the meeting.

One more thing it insists on: ask for a figure, not a range. A range is read as its bottom.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.