TLDR
Most tech companies grant RSUs on a four-year schedule with quarterly vesting after an initial one-year cliff. At mid-career, you may have multiple overlapping grants vesting on different schedules. Tracking your vesting calendar — upcoming vest dates, share amounts, and values — lets you plan for tax bills, make informed job change decisions, and understand the actual pace of your wealth accumulation.
- Vesting Cliff
- The date when the first portion of an RSU grant becomes yours. Standard grants often have a one-year cliff, meaning no shares vest until your one-year grant anniversary. After the cliff, shares vest continuously — monthly or quarterly — until the full grant is delivered.
DEFINITION
- Grant Date
- The date your employer authorized the equity grant. RSU grants are typically tied to your hire date, annual review cycle, or a special retention grant. Each grant has its own vesting schedule running from its grant date.
DEFINITION
- Vesting Event
- A specific date when a defined number of shares vest and are delivered to your brokerage account. For quarterly vesting, this happens four times per year. Each vesting event is a taxable income event — ordinary income on the fair market value of shares delivered.
DEFINITION
- Overlapping Grants
- Multiple RSU grants from the same employer on different schedules. Common at tech companies: a new hire grant plus annual refresh grants. Mid-career at a large tech company, you may have three or four active grants vesting simultaneously, with different amounts vesting from each on the same quarterly dates.
DEFINITION
What Vesting Looks Like Mid-Career
At hire, you typically receive one RSU grant: a number of shares vesting over four years with a one-year cliff. Simple to track.
By year three or four at the same company, the picture is more complex. You have the original new hire grant (vesting its final year or already complete). You have a refresh grant from your first or second annual review. You may have another from a subsequent review or a retention grant. Each has its own cliff date and quarterly vest schedule.
On a given vesting date — say, the 15th of February, May, August, and November — shares from three or four different grants may vest simultaneously. The combined number can be substantially larger than any individual grant’s quarterly installment.
This is where a vesting calendar becomes essential. Without it, you are logging into your equity portal quarterly and seeing a share delivery without context: how many came from which grant, how many unvested shares remain in each, and when the last vest from each grant will occur.
Building a Vesting Calendar
A functional vesting calendar has these components for each active grant:
- Grant date: When the company authorized the grant.
- Cliff date: When the first shares vest (typically one year after grant date for new hire grants).
- Quarterly vest date and amount: Specific dates and share counts for each quarterly vest. For a 1,000-share grant with quarterly vesting after a one-year cliff, that is 250 shares at the one-year mark, then 62 or 63 shares quarterly for the following three years.
- Shares vested to date: Cumulative shares already delivered.
- Shares unvested: Remaining shares across all future vests.
- Current unvested value: Unvested shares × current stock price.
A simple spreadsheet with one row per grant captures this. Your equity portal shows you the raw data; you are just organizing it in a view that aggregates across grants.
Connecting the Vesting Calendar to Financial Planning
Vesting events are income events. Each quarter, you receive shares worth roughly (quarterly vest amount × current stock price). After withholding, the net shares represent real financial assets.
This quarterly income affects several planning decisions:
Tax planning: High vest quarters — particularly when stock prices are elevated — can push your income into higher brackets or create significant estimated tax obligations. Knowing in Q1 what Q2 and Q3 vests will deliver lets you plan estimated payments rather than discovering the tax bill at filing.
Job change evaluation: Your unvested position is real money you would forfeit. Before accepting any offer to leave your current company, calculate the unvested RSU value on your current schedule and confirm the new offer accounts for it — either through a signing bonus covering the forfeit, or through a comparable equity package.
Diversification timing: If you plan to sell vested RSU shares (the generally recommended approach to manage concentration), knowing your quarterly vest schedule lets you plan the sales systematically rather than reactively.
Savings rate expectations: For investors tracking their financial independence timeline, equity vests are a meaningful income source alongside salary. Accurate vesting projections let you model realistic savings rates that include equity income rather than planning only from base salary.
The Tools Gap
The tracking system most tech professionals use is a spreadsheet, because the tools that should provide this functionality largely do not.
Standard wealth trackers — Empower, Monarch, Kubera, Copilot — connect to your accounts and show balances. They do not have the data model for equity grants, vesting schedules, or unvested position tracking. They were not built for this use case.
The current practical approach: use your equity portal for authoritative grant data, build or maintain a vesting calendar spreadsheet, and use a wealth aggregator for the rest of your accounts. Connect the two by manually adding an “unvested equity” balance to your aggregator that you update quarterly.
As equity compensation becomes more central to how tech companies compensate employees, wealth aggregators that integrate equity portal data are the natural next step. Until that infrastructure is broadly available, a maintained vesting calendar is the most reliable system.
Q&A
How do I track multiple RSU grants with different vesting schedules?
Build or use a vesting calendar that shows each grant separately: grant date, total shares, cliff date, quarterly vest amount, and shares remaining. For overlapping grants, you want to see the combined quarterly vest amount — the total shares from all active grants that vest on each upcoming date. Your equity portal may show this combined view. If not, a spreadsheet with one row per grant date is the most reliable approach.
Q&A
What happens to unvested RSUs when I change jobs?
Unvested RSUs are almost always forfeited when you leave your employer. Your vested shares are yours to keep. This is the 'golden handcuffs' calculation that matters before accepting a new job offer: how many unvested shares would you leave behind, at what current stock price, on what remaining schedule? That forfeit value should be covered by the new offer's equity package plus any improvement in other compensation.
Q&A
How do I calculate the value of my unvested RSUs?
For each active grant: (unvested shares remaining) × (current stock price) = unvested value for that grant. Sum across all active grants for your total unvested position. This number changes as the stock price changes and decreases as vests occur. For planning purposes, calculate at today's price — do not project future stock prices into your net worth calculation.
Q&A
When do I owe taxes on RSU vests?
Each vesting event is a taxable income event. Ordinary income tax is assessed on the fair market value of shares delivered on the vest date. Your employer typically withholds shares or cash to cover the estimated tax liability (called 'sell to cover' or 'withhold to cover'). The net shares you receive are after this withholding. You may owe additional tax or receive a refund at filing depending on your total income, withholding rates, and tax situation.
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