Speaking of salaries being before tax, in Australia for example you'd only see 63 cents in the dollar out of that 5k (assuming a salary of $80k a year, probably not unreasonable for a lot of Australian developers). Might you also consider extra time off? I've done this before, and at one place ended up negotiating 1 day off every second week instead of a pay rise; I still, more or less, got just as much work done in 9 days as 10, and neither I nor the company had to fork over more money to the government. Not to mention, a long weekend every second weekend was great for relaxation and opened up possibilities for my wife and I to travel slightly further afield than we could for a standard length weekend.