Your base pay is not what you were paid. BAH and BAS never had tax taken off them, and a civilian salary does. That gap is bigger than most people expect, and it is why a number that sounds like a raise can be a cut.
Read the figures off your own LES. We hold no pay tables — yours already reflect your ZIP code, rank and dependents, and they never go out of date.
Monthly figures, straight off the entitlements column of your LES. Leave anything blank that does not apply.
The rate that matters here is everything that comes off a civilian paycheck: federal income tax, Social Security and Medicare at 7.65%, and state tax if your state has one. For most people leaving service that lands somewhere between 18% and 28%.
Nine states have no income tax, which moves this several points on its own. If you are choosing between offers in different states, run it twice.
TRICARE cost you almost nothing. Civilian premiums come out of your pay before you see it, and this is the line people forget. Your share of the premium, not the employer's.
Family coverage commonly runs $400–$700 a month out of an employee's own pocket. Ask what the employee contribution is before you accept — it is a fair question and the answer can be worth thousands.
Optional. Put in a salary and see where it actually lands.
Enter what is on your LES and this fills in.
An estimate based on what you entered. Verify against your LES and a current tax table before you rely on it.
Take someone on $3,800 base, $1,900 BAH and $460 BAS. That is $45,600 of taxable pay and $28,320 that was never taxed at all — about $74,000 of compensation.
To take home that same $28,320 from a salary, at a 22% combined rate, you need roughly $36,300 of gross pay. So the civilian equivalent is around $82,000, not $74,000, and nowhere near the $45,600 base figure that people tend to quote when someone asks what they earn.
This is the single most common way veterans undersell themselves in a salary conversation. They answer with base pay, because that is the number on the pay chart, and then judge an offer against it.
It is not the whole picture either way. Civilian jobs often pay overtime, which military pay never did. They may match retirement contributions. And the calculation says nothing about whether the work is better, the hours are survivable, or you get to stay in one place — all of which are real and none of which show up in a salary figure.
Thirty days of leave a year is generous by civilian standards. Two weeks is common in a first civilian job, and some roles start with less. Ask how much, whether it rolls over, and whether sick days are separate.
If you are leaving before twenty years you are not drawing a pension, and a 401(k) match is real money — typically 3% to 6% of salary, which is a few thousand a year most people never count when comparing offers.
Base housing and a five-minute drive do not survive the transition. A job paying $8,000 more in a city that costs $15,000 more to live in is a pay cut with extra steps.
Sometimes the right move is the lower offer — the one that puts you in an industry you want, or gets you the certification someone else pays for. That is a legitimate choice. Make it deliberately, with the number in front of you, rather than because a salary sounded large.
When you get to the conversation itself, the Interview Prep guide covers how to answer the salary question without naming a number too early.