Elastic (ESTC) NSO Exercise Calculator
Calculator · free · no signup · ESTCPlan your Elastic 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 Elastic
Elastic (ESTC) is a public Data company, incorporated in P7 and headquartered in Amsterdam, P7. IPO'd Oct 5, 2018.
Last close: $60.11 per share (as of 2026-06-17).
HQ NL; US-listed.
Equity grants at Elastic typically include non-qualified stock options (NSOs) and restricted stock units (RSUs).
Elastic is a Dutch-American software company that provides a platform for enterprise search, observability, and cybersecurity. Its product enables users to search and analyze large-scale data, monitor system performance, and detect anomalies. Originally known as Elasticsearch, the company was founded in 2012 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and has maintained its operational headquarters in both the Netherlands and San Francisco, California, US. Elastic is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ESTC.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Elasticsearch began as a side project Shay Banon released as open source in February 2010, a distributed search engine built on Apache Lucene, designed to be easy to deploy and query at scale. Banon, Steven Schuurman, Simon Willnauer, and Uri Boness co-founded Elastic N.V. in Amsterdam in 2012 to commercialize the project alongside the Elastic Stack: Kibana for dashboards, Logstash for data ingestion, and Beats for lightweight agents. The stack became the dominant open-source logging and observability toolchain for cloud-native infrastructure. Elastic IPO'd on NYSE as ESTC in October 2018 and reported $1.48 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org · elastic.co
Equity comp at Elastic
- 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 Elastic.
Use this calculator to estimate your Elastic (ESTC) 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 Elastic (ESTC)'s last close of $60.11, exercising 5,000 NSOs with a $18.03 strike creates a $210,400 bargain element, taxed as ordinary income on the day you exercise. Combined federal + state + FICA on that bargain typically lands between $56,808 and $94,680 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 Elastic tools → · Use the generic NSO Exercise Calculator for any company.
Elastic equity questions
- How is a Elastic 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 Elastic grant and compares selling the shares now against holding past the one-year mark for long-term capital-gains treatment.
- Does Elastic grant ISOs, NSOs, or RSUs?
- Equity compensation at Elastic 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 Elastic RSUs use double-trigger vesting?
- No. Elastic 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 Elastic equity alongside hedging, vesting, and de-concentration, across bullish, neutral, and bearish market scenarios. Free during beta.