rsu_sell_vs_hold
Compare selling RSUs at vest versus holding to long-term capital gains, factoring in federal, state, FICA, and withholding shortfalls to guide your decision.
Instructions
Use this when someone asks whether to sell RSUs at vest or hold them, whether to sell their vested shares or diversify out of company stock, or about the tax and withholding on a restricted stock unit (RSU) vest. After-tax RSU vest analysis: sell-at-vest vs hold-to-long-term-capital-gains (LTCG) over holdYears. Covers federal ordinary tax, state tax, FICA (Social Security + Medicare + Additional Medicare), and the shortfall between mandatory 22% supplemental withholding and the user's marginal bracket. Use for RSUs at vest; for ISO/AMT use amt_iso_optimize, for NSO use nso_calculate. Deterministic and offline; tax tables compiled in. Returns vest, hold, sellNowInvest, holdMinusSell, and bracketJump; see outputSchema for the full shape. Example call: {shares: 1000, currentPrice: 100, ordinaryIncome: 200000, filingStatus: "single", stateCode: "CA", stillEmployed: true, holdYears: 2, volatility: 0.3, ticker: "MSFT"}. 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 | Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) shares vesting in this tranche. 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 vest (0.25..5). Below 1 year triggers the short-term capital gains cliff (ordinary rates on appreciation). 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. | |
| 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. | |
| currentPrice | Yes | Fair market value per share at vest, USD. Also the cost basis on retained shares. Must come from the user. | |
| filingStatus | Yes | Federal filing status. | |
| stillEmployed | Yes | True if still employed at vest. Drives FICA applicability and whether the 22% supplemental withholding rule applies. | |
| ordinaryIncome | Yes | Annual ordinary income before this vest, USD. Baseline for the bracket walk on the vest amount. 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 | Keep the after-tax shares for holdYears, then sell. | |
| vest | Yes | Tax bill at vest on the full vest value (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. | |
| holdMinusSell | Yes | hold.netAtYearN - sellNowInvest.netAtYearN in dollars. Positive favors holding the vested shares; negative favors selling at vest and reinvesting. | |
| sellNowInvest | Yes | Counterfactual: sell every share at vest and reinvest the net cash at expectedMarketReturn for holdYears. |