Comparing Two Offers When One Quotes LPA And The Other Quotes Monthly, Across Two Countries

A Week Of Arguing About Two Unlike Numbers

An LPA offer and a monthly offer cannot be compared as printed. Annualize both, run the LPA side through a salary model to an estimated monthly in-hand, convert that figure at a dated central bank reference rate, and compare month against month in one currency. My sister held two offers last year.

A Lahore company quoted her PKR 3,60,000 a month. A remote Indian company quoted her 18 LPA. For a week, my family compared the two headlines directly, which means my family compared an annual figure in Indian rupees with a monthly figure in Pakistani rupees and wondered why the argument never settled. One side kept saying eighteen lakh sounded enormous. The other side kept saying three lakh sixty thousand sounded bigger. Both sides were comparing the shape of the numbers, not the money.

The worksheet below is the one I built on the kitchen table that week. It has four steps, it uses the salary calculator on this site for the Indian side, and it ended the argument in about an hour, mostly because every assumption sat on paper where everyone could point at it. A week of arguing about two numbers that were not in the same unit, currency, or time frame, settled by one sheet of paper: I have started every comparison that way since.

Step One: Put Both Offers On A Yearly Frame

Start by giving both offers the same time frame. The Lahore offer annualizes by simple multiplication: PKR 3,60,000 a month is PKR 43,20,000 a year. The Indian offer is already annual: 18 LPA means Rs 18,00,000 a year, because one lakh is Rs 100,000. Nothing has been converted yet, and already the comparison has changed shape. The family had been setting 18,00,000 against 3,60,000, a twelve-to-one distortion hiding inside a units problem.

Most bad offer comparisons are unit errors wearing the clothes of opinions.

Write both yearly figures at the top of the page, each in its own currency, clearly labeled. Beside the Lahore figure, note that it is a gross quote, because a quoted monthly salary is almost always gross of that country's payroll deductions. Beside the Indian figure, note that it is a cost figure, because CTC Is What The Employer Spends, Not What The Employee Receives.

Those two labels, gross and cost, are the whole reason the worksheet needs three more steps. The next step shrinks the Indian figure to its honest monthly size before any currency conversion touches it. Order matters: convert the salary structure first, the currency second, because exchange rates applied to a CTC total convert the employer provident fund and the gratuity accrual too, money that was never going to be monthly cash in any currency.

Step Two: Turn The LPA Offer Into Monthly In-Hand

Run the Indian offer through the calculator model: basic at 40 percent of CTC, provident fund at 12 percent of basic from each side, Gratuity Accrued At 4.81 Percent Of Basic, professional tax at Rs 2,400 a year, new tax regime.

The monthly gross is Rs 1,50,000. The estimated monthly in-hand is Rs 1,22,045. Change the regime, the basic share, or a deduction like professional tax, and the in-hand side of the worksheet moves, which is why both offers must be run under the same stated assumptions when you compare them.

The Lahore figure, quoted as monthly gross, still has its own Pakistani payroll deductions waiting on its side of the page; the worksheet compares the Indian in-hand estimate with the Lahore gross openly, labels them as such, and treats the remaining gap as the honest margin of the comparison rather than pretending both sides are equally cooked.

Step Three: Convert The Currency Once, With A Date

Now convert, once, at a reference rate with a date attached. On 24 October 2026, the State Bank of Pakistan reference rates worked out to about PKR 3.17 for one Indian rupee. At that dated rate, the Indian offer's estimated in-hand of Rs 1,22,045 becomes PKR 3,86,883 a month. Its gross of Rs 1,50,000 becomes PKR 4,75,500, for anyone who wants to see how flattering the wrong frame is.

Date the rate on the worksheet itself. A conversion done in October and quoted in January is a stale fact wearing fresh confidence. When the decision stretches over weeks, redo this one step on decision day and let the rest of the worksheet stand.

Step Four: Compare Months, Then Judge The Rest

On the honest frame, the Indian offer's estimated in-hand of PKR 3,86,883 a month stands against the Lahore offer's gross of PKR 3,60,000 a month, before the Lahore side's own deductions. The remote offer leads on money, by a margin far smaller than the headline week suggested, and the decision then moved to the questions that actually deserved the family's time.

Where does she want to live? Which role grows her skills? How stable is each employer? One question the worksheet deliberately does not answer is tax residency: where a cross-border salary is taxed depends on residency and where the work is performed, and that answer belongs to an accountant, asked before signing.

One more habit belongs in this step: treat the converted figure as a snapshot, not a carving. Exchange rates drift between the week of the offer and the month of joining, sometimes by enough to move the comparison by a few thousand rupees a month.

A gap as wide as the one on this worksheet survives that drift comfortably. A gap of one or two percent does not, and a close call should be re-run at the rate of the decision week rather than defended with an old worksheet. My sister's decision never came down to that margin, but the worksheet told my family which questions were close calls and which were settled, and that sorting alone was worth the hour.

Notice what the worksheet did to the original argument. Eighteen lakh versus three lakh sixty thousand was never an argument about money. It was an argument between a year and a month, between two currencies, and between a cost figure and a cash figure. Four conversions removed all three mismatches, and the real decision finally became visible underneath.

A Use Case: Your Own Two Offers, Fifteen Minutes

Take any two offers that quote in different frames and run the same four steps. Annualize the monthly one. Run the LPA one through the calculator and write the estimated in-hand beside its gross. Convert once, at today's central bank reference rate, and write the date beside the rate. Then compare month against month and move the conversation to growth, stability, and where you will live.

Keep the worksheet. When the first payslip arrives from whichever offer you chose, set it next to your estimate and check which assumption moved. That small audit, done once, teaches you more about salary structure than a year of reading offer letters, and it makes the next comparison, in whichever countries it happens, a fifteen-minute job instead of a week of arguing.