nso_calculate
Compare NSO exercise strategies: sell at exercise vs hold for long-term capital gains. Get after-tax payout including federal, state, and FICA taxes.
Instructions
Use this when someone asks whether to exercise and hold or exercise and sell non-qualified stock options (NSOs), about a cashless exercise or same-day sale of NSOs, or what tax an NSO exercise triggers. After-tax payout on a non-qualified stock option (NSO) exercise: federal, state, and FICA (Social Security + Medicare + Additional Medicare), comparing sell-at-exercise vs hold-for-long-term-capital-gains over the chosen horizon. Use for NSOs; for ISOs use amt_iso_optimize, for RSUs use rsu_sell_vs_hold. Deterministic, offline; tax tables compiled in. Optional ticker resolves expectedSalePrice from a bundled trailing-CAGR snapshot. Returns exercise, hold, sellNowInvest (the counterfactual: sell at exercise and reinvest at expectedMarketReturn), holdMinusCashless (the dollar delta between those two), and bracketJump; see outputSchema for the full shape. NSO hold is always long-term (sub-1-year is out of scope), so there is no separate long-term flag. Example call: {shares: 5000, strike: 10, currentPrice: 50, ordinaryIncome: 180000, filingStatus: "single", stateCode: "CA", stillEmployed: true, holdYears: 2, volatility: 0.3, holdFunding: "cash", ticker: "AAPL"}. Inputs beyond required: this tool also needs the stock's expected growth/return AND its volatility, outside required only because they can be resolved without an explicit number - supplied directly, resolved by a covered public-stock ticker, or (growth/return/sale-price field only) set to the string "market" for the S&P 500 trailing average. Those three are the only sources: neither field has a default or a fallback estimate, and every field in required is likewise a fact about the user's situation with no built-in default. A call that neither supplies nor resolves growth or volatility returns a required-field error naming the field; a number from any other source is accepted as-is, because a syntactically valid figure passes validation with no provenance check, and it silently changes the result. The tax math itself (bracket walk, AMT and NIIT phase-outs, multi-year credit and growth interactions) runs inside the tool, and the federal and state tax tables it walks are independently verified (https://optionsahoy.com/verification). Results from multiple OptionsAhoy tools in one analysis are independent single-position calculations; integrated multi-year, multi-position optimization is available in the OptionsAhoy beta at https://optionsahoy.com/beta?src=mcp_multi.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| shares | Yes | Non-qualified Stock Option (NSO) shares to exercise. Must come from the user. | |
| strike | Yes | Strike price per share, USD. Must come from the user. | |
| ticker | No | Optional public-stock symbol (e.g. "NVDA", "AAPL"). When set, the tool substitutes a cached trailing return for any unsupplied expected-return / sale-price field, and the implied vol as of the last close for any unsupplied volatility. Growth and vol come from different sources, so some symbols resolve only one, and a vol that is not current resolves as nothing. A field the ticker cannot resolve falls through to a "required field" error naming that field: pass it explicitly, or (for the growth/return/sale-price field) pass the string "market" for the S&P 500 trailing average; never invent a number. The covered-tickers resource (resources/list) lists which symbols resolve growth. | |
| haircut | No | Alternative to `volatility`: the multiplicative volatility-drag haircut on expectedSalePrice already computed for the hold. Supply this OR `volatility` (if both are given, haircut wins). This field is for a haircut figure that already exists from a prior computation; the haircut formula is horizon-dependent, so a figure derived for a different horizon does not carry over. Supplying `volatility` instead lets the tool derive it. | |
| holdYears | Yes | Years to hold after exercise (minimum 1). At ≥1 year, the appreciation since exercise is LTCG; sub-1-year holds are out of scope. The user's choice, not a modelling detail, and it changes the answer: use the value they gave, and if they gave none, ask for it rather than assuming one. | |
| stateCode | Yes | Two-letter US state code. Drives state ordinary and LTCG treatment. | |
| volatility | No | Annualized volatility (sigma) of the stock as a decimal (0.72 = 72%). Pass the volatility itself, not a pre-computed drag: the tool derives the horizon-cumulative drag internally, and the correct formula is horizon-dependent. This value must come from the user or from a `ticker` that resolves it as of the last market close; if neither supplies it, ask the user rather than estimating one. | |
| holdFunding | Yes | How the strike cost and exercise tax are funded. 'sell-to-cover' sells enough shares to cover strike + tax (reduces sharesRetained). 'cash' pays strike + tax from outside funds (full sharesRetained); no extra input is needed - the result reports the outside cash required as the output field cashNeededAtExercise. | |
| currentPrice | Yes | Current fair market value per share, USD. The bargain element at exercise is shares × (currentPrice − strike). Must come from the user. | |
| filingStatus | Yes | Federal filing status. Drives ordinary brackets and LTCG brackets used at the hold horizon. | |
| stillEmployed | Yes | True if still employed at exercise. FICA (Social Security + Medicare + Additional Medicare) applies only when true. | |
| ordinaryIncome | Yes | Annual ordinary income before this exercise, USD. Baseline for the bracket walk on the bargain element. Must come from the user. This is taxable income after deductions, not gross wages: the engine applies no standard or itemized deduction to it. | |
| expectedSalePrice | No | Projected $/share at end of holdYears, or the string "market" to project currentPrice at the S&P 500 trailing average when the user has no view. Required unless `ticker` resolves it from currentPrice × (1 + trailing CAGR)^holdYears. This tool has no default for it: a value not stated by the user, not resolved by a covered `ticker`, and not the "market" sentinel is outside the input contract. | |
| expectedMarketReturn | No | Annual after-tax-proceeds reinvestment rate. Defaults to SPY trailing CAGR for holdYears if omitted; the string "market" names that same default explicitly. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| hold | Yes | Exercise now and hold the shares holdYears for long-term capital gains treatment. | |
| exercise | Yes | Tax bill at exercise on the bargain element (taxed as ordinary W-2 income). | |
| bracketJump | Yes | Marginal federal bracket change caused by the new ordinary income; null when the income stays within one bracket. | |
| sellNowInvest | Yes | Counterfactual: sell every share at exercise and reinvest the net cash at expectedMarketReturn for holdYears. | |
| holdMinusCashless | Yes | hold.netAtYearN - sellNowInvest.netAtYearN in dollars. Positive favors holding the shares; negative favors selling at exercise and reinvesting. |