A benefit is worth what it stops you paying. Here is how to work out the number.

By Skyler Bissell · September 2, 2026 · 9 min read

Healthcare for a family of four in Seattle costs that household $14,828 a year at our engine's rates. The same family in Berlin pays €1,340. The gap, $13,275, is what people mean when they say European healthcare is worth something in salary terms, and it is a number you can compute for your own household in about ten minutes. This page is the procedure: how to turn healthcare, childcare and vacation into figures you can set beside a job offer, and the four errors that make the arithmetic come out wrong.

Two households carry the worked examples below, and the reason there are two is itself part of the method. Healthcare and childcare are household costs, so they are priced on a family of four with two earners on $280,000 between them and children aged three and six. Vacation attaches to one person, so it is priced on a single earner on $150,000. Mixing those units is the fourth trap, and it is the one that produces the most confident wrong answers.

Step 1: Find which side of the tax line the benefit already sits on

Do this before any arithmetic, because getting it wrong double-counts or erases the whole benefit. Every statutory benefit is paid for somehow, and the question is whether that payment is already inside the tax rate you are looking at.

Our two example cities answer differently. Berlin's effective tax rate for this household is 40.1% and Seattle's is 23.2%, a gap of about seventeen points. A large part of that gap is German statutory health insurance, which is a payroll deduction and therefore already inside the 40.1%. Seattle's 23.2% has not paid for any healthcare at all. The insurer's bill arrives separately and later.

So the rule is this: if the destination funds a benefit through payroll, its cost is already in the tax figure and you must not add it again. If your home city funds nothing, the bill you pay privately is a separate line and belongs in the comparison. The cross-city evidence for how much this changes the picture is in the tax rate that is missing a line, which prices eight cities both ways.

The second half of this step is the direction of the adjustment. A benefit that removes a bill saves you after-tax money, so it belongs on the cost side of your comparison rather than added to a gross salary. Adding $32,280 of childcare relief to a gross figure understates it, because gross money is taxed before it reaches the daycare invoice. Keep every benefit in net terms and compare net to net.

Step 2: Price healthcare as your household's own outlay

The number you want is your household's own outlay: your share of the premium, plus what you spend before insurance starts paying, plus the dental and vision you buy on the side. For the Seattle family in this example that totals $14,828 a year, built from the KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey worker premium share and the realized out-of-pocket figures published by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.

Berlin's equivalent is €1,340, which is small because the statutory contribution has already been taken from the payslip and, as step 1 established, sits inside that 40.1% rate. What remains are the prescription and treatment co-payments that German households still meet themselves.

To redo this with your own numbers, take your last pay stub for the premium share and your plan's annual out-of-pocket maximum as the upper bound on a bad year. The figure that catches people out is the part of the premium the employer pays, which never appears on a payslip and is invisible unless you go looking. Your employer's health insurance contribution explains where that figure is printed and why it does not belong in this particular sum.

Step 3: Price childcare per child, per year, after any subsidy you would receive

Childcare is the largest of the three for households with young children, and it is not close. The Seattle family pays $32,280 a year for two children. The Berlin family pays €1,200, because Berlin's public Kita is free from age one and what remains is the food contribution. The swing is $30,890, which is larger than the healthcare gap and the vacation entitlement put together.

For a household with two children under school age, this single line usually decides the move.

Two adjustments matter when you substitute your own figures. Count each child separately at the rate for that child's age, since infant care is priced well above preschool care nearly everywhere. Then subtract only the subsidy you would receive at your income, which is the second trap and is discussed below. The cross-country picture is in childcare costs by country, and the fuller argument runs in childcare costs in the US and Europe.

Cash benefits go in the same step with the sign reversed. Kindergeld pays this Berlin family €6,216 a year and is universal rather than income-tested, so the household keeps it whatever the salary. The Seattle family's federal Child Tax Credit is worth $4,400. That difference is real money and belongs in the sum, though it is small next to the childcare line above it.

Step 4: Price vacation against one earner's own pay

Time off converts to money through a day rate. For a single earner on $150,000, one working day is worth $577 of gross pay, taking a 260-day working year. The same salary in Berlin gives a day value of €496 once it is expressed in euros.

Multiply the day value by the days and you have the entitlement. Germany's statutory minimum is 20 days under the Bundesurlaubsgesetz, which prices at €9,923 for this earner. The United States has no statutory vacation at all, so the same calculation returns $0. That zero is a true statement about the law rather than a missing number, and it is also the reason the vacation line is the most misread of the three.

Two warnings attach to that €9,923. The 20 days are a legal floor that many German employers exceed, with collectively bargained contracts commonly running to 25 or 30 days, so your offer letter is the authority rather than the statute. And a US reader almost certainly already has paid time off from an employer who grants it voluntarily, which means the gain is the difference between the two contracts. The day-rate ladder at three different salaries, along with what a day is worth after tax, is in how much a vacation day is worth, and the statutory picture across countries is in vacation days by country.

The four errors that break the arithmetic

Each of these produces a plausible number, which is what makes them dangerous.

A wrong benefit figure looks exactly like a right one.

• The invisible premium. The share of a US health premium paid by the employer never appears on a payslip, so people either miss it or, having found it, add it to their own outlay. It belongs in a compensation comparison and not in a household cost comparison, because your household never pays it.
• The means-tested subsidy. Childcare assistance in the United States is income-tested, and the professional salaries this site's readers are weighing usually sit above the cutoff. Seattle's own child care assistance program is capped by a share of state median income. Applying a headline subsidy you would not qualify for is the quickest way to understate a US childcare bill by tens of thousands.
• The legal floor read as the offer. Statutory minimums describe what an employer may not go below. On vacation the floor and the market diverge widely, in both directions: 0 statutory days in the United States against a professional norm of two or three weeks, and 20 in Germany against a bargained norm well above it.
• The wrong unit. Healthcare and childcare scale with the household. Vacation scales with the earner. Pricing 20 days against this family's combined $280,000 rather than one salary would inflate the vacation line by roughly the ratio of the two, which is why the worked examples above deliberately use two different households.

What these four numbers do not yet tell you

You now have three priced lines and a cash benefit, all in after-tax terms. What you do not have is an equivalent salary, because assembling them requires solving for the gross figure that leaves your household with the same net cash after tax, housing and every other line moves at the same time. Housing usually moves further than any benefit, and taxes move with the salary you are solving for, so the assembly is circular and does not reduce to addition.

That is what the calculator does. Put the offer in and it runs the full ledger for your household, or read the Seattle to Berlin family comparison to see every line for the household used on this page. If you would rather see the benefit side ranked across cities before doing your own, the Safety-Net Index prices what a family gets back in 178 of them, and the broader case for counting any of this sits in what every cost-of-living calculator gets wrong.

Common questions

How much is universal healthcare worth in salary?

For one worked household it is $13,275 a year: a two-earner family of four on $280,000 pays $14,828 for healthcare in Seattle and €1,340 in Berlin. That figure is what the household itself pays, so it is the number to put beside an offer. It is not the cost of the system, which is far larger and is collected through the German payroll deduction that sits inside Berlin's 40.1% effective tax rate. Your own figure depends on your employer's plan, so substitute your premium share and your deductible.

Should I add benefits to my salary or subtract them from my costs?

Subtract them from costs, and do it in after-tax money. A benefit that removes a bill you were paying out of your own pocket saves you post-tax dollars, so adding its value to a gross salary overstates it by your marginal rate. Free childcare worth $32,280 of after-tax spending is worth considerably more than $32,280 of extra gross pay, because the gross version is taxed before it reaches the daycare bill.

Do I count statutory vacation days if my current job already gives me time off?

Only the difference counts. Statutory vacation in the United States is 0 days, so the legal floor tells you nothing about what you personally hold; most professional US employers offer paid time off voluntarily. If your current employer gives you fifteen days and the statutory floor in the destination is 20, the gain is five days rather than 20. Price the delta against your own contract, never against the floor.

Why does a benefit calculation need to know my household?

Because the three benefits attach to different units. Healthcare and childcare are household costs that scale with the number of people and the number of children, while vacation attaches to one earner and is priced against that earner's own pay. Pricing 20 vacation days against a two-earner household's combined gross would value one person's time off at two people's salary, which is the most common unit error in this arithmetic.

Run the four steps in order and the benefit side of an offer stops being a feeling and becomes four lines you can defend to a partner or a recruiter. The order matters more than the precision: get the tax side right first, price what your household pays rather than what the system costs, and subtract what you already have before you count anything as a gain.

Sources. US household healthcare outlay is built from the KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey worker premium share and realized out-of-pocket spending from the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. German statutory health insurance: GKV-Spitzenverband. US childcare prices: US Department of Labor Women's Bureau National Database of Childcare Prices; Seattle's income-tested program: City of Seattle Child Care Assistance Program. Berlin Kita: Berlin Senate. Kindergeld: Familienkasse. Statutory leave: BMAS, Bundesurlaubsgesetz and US Department of Labor. Per-field provenance for every figure on this page is in data/_meta.json, and our price lines split between official and crowdsourced sources as described in the methodology.

Equivalent salaries solve for equal net cash after tax, housing, childcare, healthcare and the cash value of statutory benefits, and they are the salary an offer has to clear rather than a salary any employer is obliged to pay. See the methodology.