Overview
An offer is negotiable more often than candidates assume and less often than negotiation advice implies. What decides the outcome is rarely the size of the ask: it is whether you are asking the right person, at the right point, for something they can actually approve, with a reason attached. Offers are almost never withdrawn for asking. They are lost by delay, by renegotiating twice, and by asking in a way that suggests you have not decided.
What is usually negotiable?
More than base salary, and the non-salary items are often easier to approve because they do not disturb an internal band.
- **Base salary**, within the approved band — which is usually wider than the first offer.
- **Start date**, which can be worth more than money if you have a notice period or a bonus vesting.
- **Sign-on**, commonly used to compensate for a bonus you forfeit by leaving.
- **Annual leave**, in markets where it is not statutorily fixed for your level.
- **Relocation support** for a cross-border move: flights, temporary accommodation, a shipping allowance, school fees in some packages.
- **Title and reporting line**, which cost nothing and can matter more to your next move than the salary does.
- **Review timing** — an agreed review at six months, in writing, when the band genuinely cannot move now.
When should you raise it?
Once, after the verbal offer and before you accept anything in writing. That is the point of maximum goodwill: they have chosen you, and nothing has been committed internally yet.
Raising it earlier turns an assessment conversation into a negotiation before you have any leverage. Raising it after acceptance, or a second time, does real damage — that is the behaviour that makes an employer reconsider, far more than the number.
How should you ask?
In one message, with everything in it, and a reason for each item.
Say that you want the role — if you do. Name the specific items and the specific numbers. Attach each to something the employer can recognise: the scope of the role, a competing offer if one genuinely exists, a bonus you are forfeiting, the cost of a relocation they have asked you to make. Then say what you will do if they agree: "if you can do this, I will accept today."
That last sentence is what converts a negotiation into a decision, and it is the part most candidates leave out.
What loses an offer?
Rarely the ask itself. The recurring causes are these:
- **Negotiating twice.** Agreeing a number, then returning with another item, tells an employer that nothing is final.
- **Going silent.** A week of no response while you wait for another process reads as ambivalence, and the runner-up is still available.
- **Using a competing offer that does not exist.** It is checkable more often than candidates expect, and in a regional market with a small number of employers in each sector, it is remembered.
- **Asking for something the person you are speaking to cannot approve**, without asking who can.
Should you tell them you have another offer?
If it is real, yes, and factually: the company, the level, the timeline you have been given. Vagueness invites suspicion, and "I have another offer" without detail carries very little weight.
If you would take this role over the other one, say that too. Candidates worry it weakens their position; in practice it converts the conversation into the employer solving a problem for someone who wants to join them, which is a much better position to negotiate from.
What if the answer is no?
Ask two questions before you decide. Is this the top of the band for this level, or the top of what is approved today? And what would move it — a review at a defined point, a different title, a scope change?
Then decide on the role as offered. A role you would decline at this number is a role you should decline; a role you would take is not improved by resentment about the number you did not get.
What about counter-offers from your current employer?
Treat it as a separate decision, not as leverage. Using a new offer to extract a raise is short-term arithmetic with a long-term cost: your employer now knows you were leaving, and the reasons that made you look usually survive the raise.
Where does a consultant help?
By knowing the band before you ask, and by carrying the ask without the relationship cost. If a consultant introduced you, tell them exactly what you want and let them test it — that is the part of the job you are not paying for, and we never charge job seekers a fee.