A job near home pays £34,000. Another offers £36,000 and requires three days a week in an office across Birmingham. The £2,000 difference works out at about £167 a month before deductions. The railway charges its fare out of the money that reaches your bank account. Whether the second offer gives you more spending money depends partly on which trains you can actually take.
Put both offers on the same terms
Ask for the salary, working hours, workplace, attendance pattern, pension arrangements, benefits and annual leave in writing. Acas recommends that employers include these kinds of terms when making an offer. Check how the hours are distributed across the week. A finish at half past five can put you on a different train from a finish at five, even when the advertised journey time looks identical.
Pin down the meaning of “three office days”. Can you choose them? Must everyone be in on Tuesday? Does induction require a month in the office every day? Ask who decides on exceptions and how far ahead the rota is known. A pass covering consecutive days may look attractive until you learn that your team attends on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
A short message can resolve several assumptions. “Thank you for the offer. I’m checking the journey against the working pattern. Could you confirm the usual start and finish times, which office the team uses and whether the three attendance days are fixed? I’d also appreciate the induction schedule so I can price the first month’s travel.” Use the address in the reply to check the whole journey.
Work out the cash available for travel
Estimate the monthly take-home pay for each offer. HMRC’s current-year estimator can account for Income Tax, National Insurance, pension contributions and student loan repayments for employees paid monthly through their employer. Enter the information relevant to each job, including any difference in your own pension contribution. Check what your figures cover before making another deduction. Counting your pension payment twice can make one offer look artificially poor.
Suppose the better-paid job leaves you £120 more in a representative month after deductions. This figure is invented for the comparison. It cannot tell another person what they will take home on £36,000. Keep employer pension contributions in a separate benefits column. They may matter a great deal to your decision, even though they cannot pay for next week’s train.
Price the near-home journey too. In this case it costs £24 for the month. Add that £24 to the £120 pay advantage. You can spend up to £144 commuting to the Birmingham job before its cash advantage disappears, assuming no other costs differ. That £144 is the most useful number to have in front of you while checking tickets.
Compare tickets for the days you attend
In a month with twelve office days, twelve £13 returns cost £156. The additional travel cost against the local job is £132. Subtract it from the £120 pay advantage and the Birmingham job leaves £12 less. Suppose a pass valid for all twelve journeys costs £126. The additional cost falls to £102, leaving £18 more in your account than under the local offer.
At these invented prices, nine returns cost £117 and ten cost £130. The £126 pass starts saving money on the tenth return, provided it covers the same journeys and dates. Check its expiry, stations, routes and time restrictions. Price the return you could use for a mandatory morning meeting. A cheaper train that arrives after the meeting starts has little bearing on your decision.
One change in attendance can also change the answer. With eleven £13 returns, Birmingham travel costs £143, just inside the £144 budget. At twelve returns you cross the threshold. If both jobs offer hybrid working, adjust the local £24 whenever its attendance changes too. Keeping one side fixed only makes sense when that particular cost really stays the same.
Follow the route from your front door
Trace a real working day from leaving home to sitting at your desk. Include the walk to the station, time allowed for a connection, the journey from the far platform and the office entrance you may actually use. Repeat it in reverse at finishing time. If the far office adds forty minutes per return trip compared with the local journey, twelve such days add eight hours in that month.
List any extra cost that follows from those hours. A paid after-school session once a week could matter more than the difference between tickets. Count only the amount attributable to this job. If your household already pays for the session whichever offer you take, it adds nothing to the comparison. Apply the same reasoning to parking permits, station buses and a second household car.
Try the route at the relevant time if you can. Test the narrowest connection and find the next available service home if you miss it. You may be perfectly happy spending forty minutes reading on a through train and much less happy allowing the same time for two changes. Write down which part of the day the longer trip would displace.
Look at contracted hours alongside commuting time. If the local offer requires thirty-five hours a week and the Birmingham offer requires thirty-seven and a half, the second job also takes ten extra working hours across four full weeks. In the example with twelve return journeys, that would put eighteen additional hours into work and travel combined. If the two contracts have equal hours, the difference is eight. Check whether the daily lunch break is already included in the quoted working day before doing this sum.
Check the year and the first payday
Draw a line for each month on a calendar and enter the actual office dates you can predict. Include planned leave, induction and known team meetings. For each month, choose the valid ticket combination you would buy. Add those monthly amounts and compare the annual totals. Multiplying the twelve-trip example by twelve assumes identical attendance, identical prices and an equally suitable pass in every month.
Check when you would have to pay. A £126 pass bought before your first day can be cheaper overall while still requiring more cash up front. Ask payroll when a new starter on your proposed date would first be paid. If an employer offers a season-ticket loan, ask for the repayment schedule and eligible tickets before including it in the calculation.
Decide what would change your answer
Set the money and hours beside the work itself. A funded qualification has a clearer value if you know who pays the fees, when study takes place and whether the offer includes it. For a job that promises progression, ask what the last person in the role moved on to. Give those answers their own space alongside travel costs and available evenings.
Write your decision as a sentence you can check against the offer. “With three office days and the quoted pass, I gain £18 in this month and give up eight hours. I’m willing to do that for the supervised training if the employer confirms when it begins.” If one detail would swing your choice, ask about it while both offers are still open.