Datadog (DDOG) NSO Exercise Calculator
Calculator · free · no signup · DDOGPlan your Datadog 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 Datadog
Datadog (DDOG) is a public Cloud/SaaS company, incorporated in Nevada and headquartered in New York, NY. IPO'd Sep 19, 2019.
Last close: $231.11 per share (as of 2026-06-16).
Equity grants at Datadog typically include non-qualified stock options (NSOs) and restricted stock units (RSUs).
Datadog, Inc. is an American company that provides an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform. Founded and headquartered in New York City, the company is a publicly traded entity on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc founded Datadog in 2010 after meeting as colleagues at Wireless Generation in New York, where the company remains headquartered. Cloud monitoring sits at the core of the platform, alongside APM, log management, security, and LLM observability. Shares began trading on NASDAQ under DDOG in September 2019. Fiscal 2025 revenue reached $3.43 billion (up 28 percent), with 603 customers carrying ARR of $1M or more as of December. June 2025 brought Bits AI SRE, AI Agent Monitoring, and LLM Experiments to the product lineup.
Sources: investors.datadoghq.com · datadoghq.com
Equity comp at Datadog
- 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 Datadog.
Use this calculator to estimate your Datadog (DDOG) 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.
Example: at Datadog (DDOG)'s last close of $231.11, exercising 5,000 NSOs with a $69.33 strike creates a $808,900 bargain element, taxed as ordinary income on the day you exercise. Combined federal + state + FICA on that bargain typically lands between $218,403 and $364,005 depending on your bracket and state. The calculator above computes the exact figure for your situation and compares selling now vs. holding through the long-term capital-gains threshold.
All Datadog tools → · Use the generic NSO Exercise Calculator for any company.
Datadog equity questions
- How is a Datadog 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 Datadog grant and compares selling the shares now against holding past the one-year mark for long-term capital-gains treatment.
- Does Datadog grant ISOs, NSOs, or RSUs?
- Equity compensation at Datadog typically takes the form of non-qualified stock options (NSOs) and restricted stock units (RSUs). Restricted stock units are taxed as ordinary income when they vest.
- Do Datadog RSUs use double-trigger vesting?
- No. Datadog 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 Datadog equity alongside hedging, vesting, and de-concentration, across bullish, neutral, and bearish market scenarios. Free during beta.