Advisor Equity Calculator

An advisor grant sounds abstract until you price it: 0.50% of a $10,000,000 company is $50,000 of equity, and how much of that the advisor actually owns today depends on the vesting schedule and cliff. This calculator values a startup advisor’s grant from the company valuation and equity percentage, with one-tap FAST standard percentages (0.25%, 0.50%, 1.00%), then splits the grant into vested and unvested value and shows the gross value of the full percentage at an exit valuation you choose. The worked example jumps to a $100M exit valuation; our fully diluted market cap calculator shows how those headline valuations are built.

Quick Answer

How to use the advisor equity calculator

Enter the valuation and the percentage, or tap a FAST quick-pick, then add vesting and an exit scenario only if you want those lines. The results stay hidden until you click Calculate.

1. Set the company valuation. Use the post-money figure from the last round, or the value written into the advisor agreement.
2. Set the percentage. Tap Standard 0.25%, Strategic 0.50%, or Expert 1.00% to load the FAST idea-stage bands, or type any percentage, including one above the grid.
3. Add vesting if the grant vests. Enter the vesting period in months and how many months have elapsed. Add a cliff if the agreement has one. Leave the vesting period blank and the tool values the grant with no vested/unvested split, and the elapsed and cliff fields are then ignored.
4. Add an exit valuation for the scenario line. The tool multiplies the full grant percentage by the exit figure. That is deliberate, and the dilution section below shows how to haircut it.

Advisor grants sit alongside founder splits, not inside them: if you are dividing the company among co-founders, the founder equity calculator scores contributions and layers on the option pool, and the dynamic equity split calculator covers the Slicing Pie style model where shares track contributions over time.

Worked example, checked against this exact tool

The calculator is pre-filled with this run. A company valued at $10,000,000 grants an advisor 0.50%: the grant value is $50,000. Add 24-month vesting with 12 months elapsed and no cliff, and the split is $25,000 vested, $25,000 unvested, shown as “50.0% vested (12 of 24 months).” Add a $100,000,000 exit valuation and the exit line reads $500,000.

Read that exit line carefully, because it is the line readers most often misquote: $500,000 is 0.50% of the exit valuation for the whole grant. The tool does not multiply the exit figure by the vested fraction. If this advisor left today at exactly half-vested and the company later sold for $100,000,000, the vested half of the grant maps to $250,000 gross on the same arithmetic, before the strike price needed to exercise the options, dilution from any rounds after the grant, and taxes. Run the pre-filled numbers and you will see all three lines exactly as described.

The formulas

Three formulas do all the work, and the results box prints each one with your numbers substituted in. Grant value = company valuation × (equity % ÷ 100). Vested fraction = months elapsed ÷ vesting months, capped at 100%, and forced to zero while a set cliff month is still ahead of the elapsed months. Exit value = exit valuation × (equity % ÷ 100).

Two boundary behaviours worth knowing, both verified against the tool: months elapsed beyond the vesting period still display literally (enter 36 elapsed on a 24-month schedule and the note reads “36 of 24 months”) while the fraction stays capped at 100%, and a 0% grant is valid input that returns a $0.00 grant rather than an error. If the exit valuation is filled in but invalid (zero or negative), the whole run stops with an error instead of showing the grant lines without the exit line.

How much equity should an advisor get?

The working standard is the Founder Institute’s FAST Agreement grid: 0.25% for a standard advisor (a monthly call, light touch), 0.50% for a strategic advisor (biweekly involvement, introductions, deal review), and 1.00% for an expert advisor (weekly, operator-level engagement) at the idea stage. The Founder Institute FAST Agreement publishes the grid and the template agreement behind it, and the quick-pick buttons at the top of the calculator load those three idea-stage figures directly.

Size the grant by engagement, then sanity-check the total. A common planning rule, echoed in Carta’s guide to startup advisors and in Westaway’s advisor compensation guidance, is to keep all advisor grants together around 0.5% to 1.5% of the company at the early stage. Past that, you are spending cap-table space that future hires and investors will price. If the person will do hands-on work most weeks, they are drifting into contractor or co-founder territory, where what the company is actually worth today (the job of a company valuation calculator) matters more than the grid. If you would rather share revenue than ownership, our revenue share calculator models that alternative.

Vesting and cliffs, in plain English

Advisor equity normally vests over about two years of monthly vesting, so an advisor who disappears in month two does not keep a full grant. Each month, 1/24 of the grant vests. A cliff changes the start: nothing vests until the cliff month, then the accrued slice vests at once, and monthly vesting continues from there.

The tool models the cliff exactly that way. Set a 3-month cliff with 2 months elapsed on a $12,000,000 valuation and a 0.25% grant, and the vested line reads “$0.00 (cliff of 3 months not yet reached)” against a $30,000 grant. Set a 6-month cliff with 6 months elapsed on a $40,000 grant over 24 months, and vesting switches on: the tool shows 25.0% vested (6 of 24 months), $10,000. FAST-style templates, such as the FAST-style advisor agreement template at Promise Legal, write the same structure into the contract: two-year vesting, monthly after a short cliff, NSO grant at a board-set exercise price tied to the 409A valuation, a practice the National Venture Capital Association’s model legal documents also reflect for equity awards.

The FAST grid by company stage

The FAST percentages shrink as the company matures, because the same weekly effort buys a smaller slice of a bigger, de-risked pie. The full grid:

Note what the quick-picks do and do not do: they load the idea-stage column only, since that is the column the FAST template leads with. For a startup-stage or growth-stage grant, type the stage-matched figure (0.40%, 0.30%, and so on) into the percentage field yourself. The calculator accepts any percentage, including the 0.40% used in the growth-stage scenario below.

The dilution reality check

The exit value is gross and pre-dilution, and dilution is not a footnote. Every funding round issues new shares, so a 0.50% grant rarely stays 0.50% by exit. Two rounds at 20% dilution each turn 0.50% into 0.32% (0.5 × 0.8 × 0.8): at a $100,000,000 exit that is $320,000 instead of the $500,000 the undiluted math suggests.

There are two more deductions the headline hides. Advisor options carry a strike price, so exercising costs money or shares, and the tax bill follows the option rules: under IRS Topic No. 427, Stock Options, the spread on an NSO is generally ordinary income at exercise. Treat the tool’s exit figure as the optimistic ceiling of a scenario, useful for comparing grants on equal terms, not as a forecast. Tools that model the share-count side of the same problem, such as our Gust equity calculator, approach it from the cap table rather than the percentage.

Three grants, three stages: worked scenarios

Each scenario below is a verified run of the calculator above, so you can reproduce every number by typing the inputs in. They show how the same grid produces very different money at different stages.

The middle row is the cliff doing its job: the company kept the full $30,000 of equity because the advice barely started. The bottom row carries the dilution warning in concrete terms: two rounds at 20% dilution each would cut 0.40% to about 0.26%, and the $2,000,000 gross exit figure to roughly $1,280,000, before strike price and taxes.

What competing calculators miss

Advisor equity advice and advisor equity math usually live on different pages. The gaps:

• CalculatorsHub’s advisor equity tool: it has vesting and cliff logic, but it works in shares of an equity pool (pool × advisor percentage of the pool), never in dollars. There is no valuation input, no vested dollar figure, and no exit scenario, so you finish with a percentage of a percentage.
• BraveCalculator’s equity compensation tool: valuation × percentage ÷ vesting years gives an annualized value, an employee-offer framing. No cliff, no vested-vs-unvested split today, no FAST bands, and nothing advisor-specific about the terms.
• Guidance with no calculator (Westaway, Carta, the FAST template itself): the best material on what percentage is normal, how NSOs are taxed, and why grants should be stated as share counts lives in law-firm and platform guides with no tool attached, so readers price the advice in their heads.
• The gap this page fills: the FAST grid as one-tap inputs, dollar grant value, vested and unvested dollars with cliff behaviour, and a gross exit scenario on the same page, with the exit line’s limits (full percentage, pre-dilution, pre-strike, pre-tax) stated where the number appears rather than in a disclaimer nobody reads.

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