bigtechcalc

One grant, one ledger row, no guessing

RSU Refresher Calculator

Model a single refresher policy on its own and watch concurrent grants stack toward steady state. Free, no signup — and unlike a hand-typed spreadsheet formula, every overlapping tranche is its own row, not a rolling-window sum that quietly over- or under-counts.

Your refresher policy

Pre-filled with the spec's own regression fixture: a $150,000 refresher growing 3%/yr on an even four-year vest, 0% price appreciation. Year 1 below is the grant year itself (nothing vests yet); four years later, Year 5 should read $156,886.01 — change any input to model your own offer.

Price on the first refresher's grant date.
Separate from grant size growth below — this is what the stock itself does.
Year 1 = your first year in the role.
Grant SIZE growth. Not share price.

Results

Ramping Steady state

Year-by-year detail

Refresher tranche ledger

Want to compare this offer against others, with base salary, bonus, sign-on and an initial grant in the mix? The full multi-offer calculator runs the same engine across up to five offers side by side, under three growth scenarios.

What an RSU refresher actually is

A new-hire equity grant is a one-time event, sized for a specific vesting schedule — commonly four years. On its own, it produces a predictable curve: vesting ramps or tapers depending on the schedule shape, then stops entirely once the grant is fully vested. Left alone, most people's equity income would fall to zero in year five.

A refresher exists to prevent that. Most large technology employers issue an additional RSU grant on top of the initial one, typically once a year, on its own independent vesting schedule. The refresher doesn't replace what's still vesting from the initial grant or from prior refreshers — it stacks on top of it. That stacking is the entire subject of this calculator.

Why overlapping tranches are hard to model by hand

The natural way to model a refresher in a spreadsheet is a rolling-window formula: this year's refresher income equals a fraction of this year's grant, plus a fraction of last year's, plus a fraction of the year before. That works exactly as long as the number of concurrent grants never changes. It breaks the moment it does — a formula written for four concurrent grants that keeps being copied forward will silently include a fifth once refreshers have been running long enough, overcounting that year's income by roughly the size of one full tranche.

This calculator doesn't use a rolling-window formula anywhere. Every grant — the initial one and every refresher — generates its own set of vest events based on its own grant date and its own schedule. Those events are stored as an explicit ledger, one row per vest event, and the year-by-year totals are a straightforward sum over whichever ledger rows land in that year. Overlap isn't a special case to handle; it falls out of the data structure automatically, which is also why the ledger below is worth reading, not just the chart above it.

Steady state, and why year four looks different from year one

On a four-year annual vesting schedule with an annual refresher, the number of concurrent grants goes 1, 2, 3, 4 — and then holds at 4 for as long as refreshers keep being issued. That fourth year is steady state: the point where grant count stops climbing. It doesn't mean income stops growing, though — if refresher size grows year over year (a separate input in this tool, see below), or the share price appreciates, total income can keep rising even after concurrent grant count flattens. What steady state tells you is that the ramp is over. Years one through three are structurally different from every year after; comparing offers on year-one numbers alone compares two offers at their least representative point.

Two growth rates that are not the same thing

This tool asks for two separate growth inputs on purpose. Refresher grant growth is a compensation policy choice — the employer decides this year's refresher is worth more dollars than last year's, independent of anything the stock does. Share price appreciation is what happens to the stock after a grant is made, and it changes the value of shares that were already granted, at whatever price they're worth on each vest date. A model that only grows the grant size and never touches the share price will report that a $150,000 grant pays out exactly $150,000 no matter what the company's stock does over the next four years. That's the single largest defect in most DIY compensation spreadsheets, and it's why this calculator converts every grant dollar amount into a share count at the grant-date price, then revalues each vesting tranche at the price on its own vest date.

How to read the results

The chart shows refresher income by year, with steady-state years shaded differently from the ramp. The year-by-year table adds cumulative income and a concurrent-grants count — watch that column to see the ramp happen, and confirm it plateaus rather than keeps climbing (a still-climbing concurrent-grants count deep into the horizon usually means the refresher schedule and refresher cadence don't actually match — for instance, a five-year vest with annual refreshers reaches five concurrent grants, not four). The tranche ledger is the underlying data both of those are built from: one row per vest event, tagged by which grant it came from and whether it falls inside or outside your chosen horizon.

Frequently asked questions

What is an RSU refresher grant?
An additional RSU grant issued on top of whatever is still vesting from prior grants, usually once a year. It exists because a new-hire's initial grant eventually runs out; the refresher is how compensation keeps pace after year one without renegotiating the whole package.
Why do refresher grants overlap?
Each refresher vests on its own multi-year schedule starting from its own grant date. If refreshers are issued annually on a four-year schedule, by year four the tail of the initial grant plus three refreshers are all vesting at once — four concurrent grants, each contributing a tranche. This calculator builds that as an explicit ledger, one row per vest event, instead of approximating it with a rolling-window formula.
What does steady state mean?
The point at which the number of grants vesting concurrently stops increasing. On a four-year annual vesting schedule with annual refreshers, that's year four: three refreshers plus the initial grant's final tranche, and every year after looks similar in grant count, though not necessarily in dollar value if the refresher size is growing.
Is grant size growth the same as share price appreciation?
No, and conflating them is the most common modelling mistake in this space. Grant size growth is a compensation policy decision. Share price appreciation is what the stock does after the grant, which changes what already-granted shares are worth on their vest date. This calculator keeps them as separate inputs.
Where are taxes in this calculator?
Not modelled. Every figure here is gross. RSUs are ordinary income at vest, valued at the vest-date share price, and are typically subject to statutory supplemental withholding that may sit below your marginal rate — your actual take-home will be materially lower than the totals shown.