Confluent NSO Exercise Calculator
Calculator · free · no signup · pre-IPOPlan your Confluent NSO exercise (federal, state, FICA) and compare sell-vs-hold for long-term capital gains.
Beta · invite-only · AlphaLatitude Inc. · Free Tools
Your grant
Tax inputs
Hold strategy
Best after-tax payout — at year 1
$199,080
Sell + invest wins by $20,783 over Hold 1 yr.
Estimates only. Not financial advice.
Sell + invest
Best payout| Bargain element (sale − strike) | $350,000 |
| Federal | |
| State | |
| Medicare | −$5,075 |
| Additional Medicare | −$3,150 |
| Market gain over 1 yr at 10.0% | $18,573 |
| LTCG on diversified gain (fed + state + NIIT) | −$5,219 |
| Net at year 1 | $199,080 |
Sell every share immediately; invest the after-tax cash at the market return for 1 yr, then liquidate. Diversified — no single-stock concentration risk.
Exercise + hold 1 yr
| Sale proceeds (year 1) | |
| LTCG tax (federal + state + NIIT) | $0 |
| Net at year 1 | $178,297 |
Sold 2,678 shares at exercise to cover strike + tax; 2,322 shares held 1 yr for LTCG.
Social Security + Medicare are payroll taxes (collectively called FICA) — they apply because you're exercising as a current employee.
Both columns are stated in year-1 dollars: sell-now proceeds compound at the market return and pay LTCG on the gain at year 1; any cash paid out of pocket on the hold side carries the same opportunity cost.
Net at year N — by hold period
Estimates only. Excludes AMT (NSOs do not trigger AMT), state-AMT, multi-state moves, and disqualifying-disposition edge cases. Not financial advice.
You calculated one NSO decision. The beta plans NSOs alongside RSUs and ISOs in a single multi-year tax plan.
Request beta access →About Confluent
Confluent is a public Data company, incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Mountain View, CA. IPO'd Jun 24, 2021.
Acquired by IBM Mar 2026 ($31/share, ~$11B all-cash); CFLT delisted from Nasdaq 2026-03-16.
Equity grants at Confluent typically include incentive stock options (ISOs), non-qualified stock options (NSOs), and restricted stock units (RSUs).
Confluent, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Confluent was founded by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede on September 23, 2014, in order to commercialize an open-source streaming platform Apache Kafka, created by the same founders while working at LinkedIn in 2008 as a B2B infrastructure company. Confluent's products are the Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, Connectors, Apache Flink, Stream Governance and Confluent Hub.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao founded Confluent in September 2014 to commercialize Apache Kafka, the open-source distributed event-streaming system they built at LinkedIn. The company sold a managed data-streaming platform covering real-time pipelines, stream processing, and connectors across cloud environments, debuting on Nasdaq under CFLT on June 24, 2021 at $36 per share. IBM announced acquisition of Confluent on December 8, 2025 and completed the all-cash deal at $31 per share on March 17, 2026, valuing the company at roughly $11 billion. CFLT was delisted from Nasdaq on March 16, 2026.
Sources: newsroom.ibm.com · cnbc.com · en.wikipedia.org
Equity comp at Confluent
- RSUs use single-trigger vesting: shares become yours as each portion vests on schedule, and the value is taxed as ordinary income at that point. No IPO or acquisition is required.
Researched 2026-05-07.
OptionsAhoy is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Confluent.
Use this calculator to estimate your Confluent NSO exercise tax (federal, state, FICA), then compare selling now versus holding through the long-term capital gains threshold. Inputs are yours: grant terms, current price, your income, your state.
All Confluent tools → · Use the generic NSO Exercise Calculator for any company.
Confluent equity questions
- How is a Confluent NSO exercise taxed?
- Exercising a non-qualified stock option (NSO) creates ordinary income on the bargain element (the price on the day you exercise minus your strike), subject to federal income tax, state income tax, and FICA. The calculator above computes that tax for your Confluent grant and compares selling the shares now against holding past the one-year mark for long-term capital-gains treatment.
- Does Confluent grant ISOs, NSOs, or RSUs?
- Equity compensation at Confluent typically takes the form of incentive stock options (ISOs), non-qualified stock options (NSOs), and restricted stock units (RSUs). Incentive stock options can trigger the alternative minimum tax (AMT) when you exercise. Restricted stock units are taxed as ordinary income when they vest.
- Do Confluent RSUs use double-trigger vesting?
- No. Confluent restricted stock units (RSUs) use single-trigger vesting: each tranche becomes yours as it vests on schedule, taxed as ordinary income at that point, with no liquidity event required.
One piece of the puzzle.
OptionsAhoy plans your Confluent equity alongside hedging, vesting, and de-concentration, across bullish, neutral, and bearish market scenarios. Free during beta.