Should I take a job with a longer commute?
Sometimes a pay rise is really a pay cut per hour of your life. Here is a worked example where £8,000 more comes with five office days and a 90-minute round trip — and the hourly rate falls.
The worked example
After 2026/27 tax, NI, Plan 2 and pension, take-home rises by £4,720 a year — but cash per committed hour falls from £17.24 to £15.90. The £8,000 better job pays £1.34 an hour less than the one it replaces.
Current — £42,000, hybrid
2 office days · 40-min round trip · £6/day
Offer — £50,000, on-site
5 office days · 90-min round trip · £14/day
On paper the offer finishes £2,327 a year ahead overall — but it buys 280 extra hours of your year (about 35 working days) to get there, so each committed hour ends up paying £1.34 less than it does today.
The number to negotiate with: break-even salary
With this commute, the offer would need to pay £46,247 just to match the current job's overall financial position — so £50,000 clears the bar by under £4,000 of real advantage, before you have valued a single hour of the lost time.
This is the most useful number in a negotiation: 'given the travel, anything under £46k is a pay cut for me' is a sentence a hiring manager can respond to. The calculator computes your break-even automatically for any pair of jobs.
What a commute really costs
Count three things: the fares or fuel (paid from take-home — after-tax money), the hours (a 90-minute round trip five days a week is hundreds of hours a year), and the quality of those hours — a seat on a train where you read is not an hour in traffic, which is why the calculator lets you discount commute time you can genuinely use.
And the cash-per-hour figure is only where the damage starts. Those 280 hours come out of evenings, training, family — so in the calculator they also feed the life axis: free time scored alongside wellbeing, growth and how well five office days fit the setup you actually want, each weighted by your own priorities. A commute this size routinely flips a money-green verdict to "stay".
None of this says never take the longer commute — it says price it. If the role is a genuine career accelerator, you may rationally pay £1.34 an hour and 35 days a year for it, and the growth rating is exactly where you tell the calculator so. The point is deciding on purpose. Related: what a rise really pays after tax.
Run this scenario with your own numbers
The button opens the calculator pre-loaded with this exact worked example — change anything and every figure recomputes live, in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded.