Maximize every RSU or ESPP sale

After the sale, the trustee withholds tax at the maximum rate: 62.2% on the income portion and 25% on the capital portion, and transfers the rest straight to your bank account. They do it because they don't know your employment situation, whether you still work at the same company, what you earn, whether you've paid Bituah Leumi up to the ceiling, and so on.

Your real rate is almost always lower than that. The difference doesn't reach your bank. The trustee reports the amounts liable for income tax (the income portion) to your employer, and your employer's payroll department withholds the real tax on that amount, which in effect returns to you the difference between the maximum tax the trustee took and the tax you actually owe. The easy way to check that the site got the amount right is to compare the net on a previous payslip against the current one (bearing in mind that apart from the share sale, the other pay components need to be identical).

So there is no place that states how much you got back. The trustee only knows what they withheld. The payslip shows one aggregated tax figure. The bank never saw this money as a separate transfer.

In the example the calculator ships with, a gross sale of ₪91,691 put ₪57,123 in the bank and a further ₪5,676 through payroll. Anyone counting their gain by their bank balance is missing about 9% of their net.

* When the grant belongs to an employer you have left, that employer can still issue you a payslip, but they don't know what you earn now, so it's unlikely the amount would reach you even if they did. The money is still yours, but you have to claim it in an annual tax refund request or an annual return. The site detects this, switches the row to "Net tax refund" and shows you the amount, so you know exactly how much you're giving up if you don't file.

Maternity allowance is paid by Bituah Leumi in a single instalment covering 3.5 months of paid maternity leave (105 days). To work out the base, Bituah Leumi averages the wage paid over either the 3 or the 6 months before the birth month, whichever average is higher.

If you sell RSUs around the birth month, you may be able to raise that allowance. Bituah Leumi spreads anything counted as employment income backwards, including the income portion of an RSU sale. That portion is spread over the preceding 12 months, minus the months with no income (paid maternity leave, and unpaid leave beyond it), so a sale from 6 months before the birth to 10 months after the birth month effectively enters the same average described above and may raise the allowance. Note that maternity pay is capped (the cap is equivalent to a monthly wage of ₪52,570 for 2026), so when your average monthly wage is above the cap, selling RSUs won't raise it.

Complicated? Yes. But the site makes the new allowance easy to calculate if you sell your shares inside that window.

In the site's example the monthly base reaches ₪25,156.61, which is about ₪88,048 over the full period, against roughly ₪80,500 on the salary (₪23,000) alone. That gap of about ₪7,548 comes from a single decision about which month to sell in, and is worth roughly 38 times the site's annual subscription.

* This holds only if the RSUs you're selling are from your current employer, or from one you left less than 6 months ago. Otherwise the allowance cannot be updated.

Like maternity pay, reserve-duty compensation is calculated from the average over the 3 months preceding the month of service. And exactly as Bituah Leumi spreads income for maternity pay, here too the income portion is spread over the preceding 12 months. So selling RSUs from 3 months before the month service starts up to 10 months after it can raise your reserve pay. There is a cap here as well, equivalent to a monthly wage of ₪51,910.

In the site's example, a monthly salary of ₪23,000 turns into monthly compensation of ₪25,587.93 thanks to the timing of the sale, roughly ₪2,588 extra for every month of service.

* This holds only if the RSUs you're selling are from your current employer, or from one you left less than 3 months ago. Otherwise the compensation cannot be updated.

Before two years have passed from the grant date, the entire sale value is taxed as employment income, at a rate that can reach 62.2%. After two years, only the part up to the grant price is taxed as employment income, and everything above it is taxed as a capital gain at 25% (which can reach 30%).

The gap is large, but waiting is a bet: the stock can fall in the meantime, turning the tax saving into a smaller net. The real question isn't "should I wait two years" but "how high does the stock have to stay for waiting to pay off".

The site gives you exactly that number: the future share price at which selling after the two-year mark leaves you with the same net as selling today. Above it, waiting wins. Below it, it doesn't. Instead of a hunch, one price to compare against.

If two years have already passed since the grant, if the stock has fallen since then, or if you ticked "What if 2 years pass?", the row doesn't appear, because it would be meaningless.

Surtax on the capital portion, 3% or 5% depending on your annual income, is not withheld at the sale itself (the trustee takes 25% off the capital portion). It surfaces in the annual return, sometimes more than a year after the money went to something else.

The site shows it at the moment of the decision, so you can set it aside instead of being surprised by it.

If you have capital gains or losses from other sales you made this year (employee shares or any other security), the additional capital gain toggle takes them (positive for a gain, negative for a loss), so both the capital gains tax and the surtax account for them.

When the calculation comes out negative, meaning your capital losses exceed your capital gains, the row becomes "Magen Mas": capital losses available to offset a future capital gain, an asset rather than a debt.