How 3M Pays

Operations ladder — O1 and O2

Technical ladder — T1 through T5A

Management ladder — M1 through M3

Executive — M4 through CEO

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• 3M job postings and salary datasets expose the T1, T2, T3, T4 and T4A labels for technical roles, but 3M has never published a global grade chart or a job-grade-to-T-level conversion table.
• An anonymous 2022 employee thread maps older job grades to T-levels and suggests technician grades JG4 to JG7, T1 near JG7 and T2 near JG9. That is a directional clue only and is never treated here as an organisation chart.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for software, research and engineering roles and progressively less precise for sales, marketing, supply chain and plant families, where 3M can place equivalent scope differently.
• The 2024 Solventum separation changed the portfolio and the employee base, but the reviewed filings publish no new global grade conversion table, so pre-spin and post-spin band references are not automatically comparable.
• Vice president, group president, senior vice president, executive vice president and chief executive are corporate titles rather than a hidden grade number, so this report treats them as title tiers.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus St. Paul

3M discloses regional headcount only, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The Americas held 35,500 full-time equivalents, Asia-Pacific 13,500 and Europe, Middle East and Africa 11,500 at the 2025 close, and no city-level split is published for Maplewood, Bangalore, Sydney or anywhere else.

St. Paul anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The St. Paul and Maplewood column is the anchor. T1 through T4A medians come from Levels.fyi records for 3M technical roles, and T3 and T4 are cross-checked against Minnesota labour condition applications at roughly $140,000 to $146,000 for research and product-development specialists.
• The operations rows are normalised from Minnesota plant salary observations. They exclude overtime, shift differentials and any collectively bargained elements, so a real plant pay packet can sit materially above the modeled figure.
• Bangalore is the India anchor and is cross-checked against 3M India's FY2025-26 median remuneration of 2,281,765 rupees, an observed Bangalore T3 sales-engineering package near 3.52 million rupees, and Glassdoor and AmbitionBox manager observations.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 13 percent of the St. Paul anchor at the operations bands and rises towards 42 percent at the top of the modeled ladder, because senior Indian packages carry a much larger parent-equity component.
• The named-executive and chief-executive rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison only. They are global executive values, not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• A clean utilisation rate against one original pool is not computable from the disclosed numbers, because the amended plan folds in prior authorisations, cancellations and forfeitures across several award types. Dividing 28.506 million outstanding awards by the 49.375 million of outstanding plus available shares is analytically tempting but is not plan utilisation, so this report does not publish it.
• Total outstanding awards at 31 December 2025 were 28.506 million: 22.243 million options, 5.127 million restricted stock units, 0.912 million performance shares and 0.224 million non-employee deferred stock units. Disclosed future issuance capacity was 38.479 million, comprising 20.869 million share-plan shares and 17.610 million purchase-plan shares.
• At about $179 a share the 20.869 million shares available for future issuance carry a notional spot value near $3.74 billion. That is neither an accounting valuation nor a committed grant value.
• The 2024 Solventum separation required outstanding 3M awards to be adjusted, and awards held by Solventum employees were converted and cancelled from 3M plans. Award counts before and after the separation are therefore not directly comparable, and the 2024 annual grant moved from the usual February timing to May.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

3M uses three-year vesting rather than the four-year Silicon Valley pattern. Executive stock options vest one third on each of the first three anniversaries and expire after ten years, employee restricted stock units generally carry a three-year cliff, and performance shares certify and settle at the end of a three-year performance period. The fourth year is shown only to make the point that a single grant is fully vested by then and that a rolling portfolio depends on receiving a new grant each year.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Access to the discounted share purchase plan is not the same thing as an equity award. The purchase plan is employee-funded and broadly available in the United States, while options, restricted stock units and performance shares are discretionary awards under the long-term incentive plan.
• 3M publishes no minimum grade for a long-term incentive award and no standard grant table. The plan makes service providers legally eligible, but the administrator decides who actually receives an award, so a plan definition cannot be read as a company-wide entitlement.
• An anonymous employee thread claims options begin around T5 or job grade 14. That is a low-confidence clue, and roughly 1,200 annual option recipients across a 60,500-person workforce makes a single universal threshold unlikely.
• Modeled annualised equity opportunity at the St. Paul anchor runs zero at O1, O2 and T1, about $2,500 at T2, $5,000 at T3, $10,000 at T4, $22,500 at T5, $50,000 at T5A, $115,000 at director level and $900,000 at the modeled vice-president row. Those are planning envelopes, not observed grants.

Indicative annual grant value by band — St. Paul / Maplewood

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $179.16 reference price at 25 August 2026 market snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The two research bundles disagree on the chief executive's 2025 target long-term incentive: one records a $13.0 million annual opportunity and the other a $14.0 million target split evenly between performance share awards and stock options. The reported grant-date accounting value of $14,755,094 falls between design target and accounting outcome and reconciles neither figure exactly, which is why both are shown rather than averaged. Shareholders rejected the advisory executive-pay vote at the May 2024 annual meeting, a governance signal that followed former chief executive Michael Roman's 2023 compensation. Kevin Rhodes's other compensation column includes a $1,620,163 change in pension and deferred compensation value, which is an accounting movement rather than cash paid.

Board compensation framework

Individual 2025 director totals generally fell in the low to high $300,000s depending on role and tenure, and a director appointed part way through the year receives a prorated amount. A complete director-by-director table should be taken directly from the current proxy for governance or transaction work; this report does not substitute an older table.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The performance framework is called Everyday eXcellence and runs initial goal setting, regular check-ins, year-end reviews and the integration of Performance Culture Behaviors. The 2025 10-K lists five behavioural expectations applied across organisational levels: deliver results, challenge the status quo, instill rigour and accountability, energize the team to act, and act responsibly and respectfully. Individual performance demonstrably affects executive cash: 2025 individual multipliers among the named executives ran from 100 to 110 percent, with Christian Goralski at 105 percent. That is proof of differentiated pay at the top, not evidence of a rating grid below it.

Dataset summary

City-level H-1B wage history

All-years aggregates. P25/P75 are rounded reconstruction values marked modeled; medians and record counts are the stronger fields.

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The bundles disagree on the chief executive's 2025 target long-term incentive. One records a $13.0 million annual opportunity and another a $14.0 million target split evenly between performance share awards and stock options. Both are shown; the $14,755,094 grant-date accounting value reconciles neither exactly.
2. 2The 2025 named-executive set differs between bundles. One lists four named executives and does not reproduce the component split for three of them; the other lists five including Kevin H. Rhodes with a full breakdown. This report uses the five-executive version because it is traceable to the Summary Compensation Table, and it notes that one bundle reported a $5,116,643 total for Rhodes against $6,736,806 in the fuller extract.
3. 3Christian Goralski's and Kevin Rhodes's equity was disclosed in aggregate in one extract and split between stock and option awards in another. The stock column here carries the combined equity value for those two rows rather than an invented split.
4. 4The India variable-pay ratio for the whole-time director is reported as 20 percent of fixed pay in the FY2025-26 material and 16.67 percent in the FY2024-25 material. The years are different, but the two are easy to confuse.
5. 5H-1B medians for the same 17 FY2025 filings range from $116,563 to $142,406 depending on provider. No single figure is correct without its filter definition.
6. 63M India's average employee increase is reported as 8.4 percent for FY2025-26 and about 9.5 percent for FY2024-25 in different bundles. Both are stated with their fiscal year rather than blended.
7. 7The board retainer figures of about $195,000 cash and $140,000 stock come from a proxy summary rather than a directly extracted director table, and the director-by-director totals were not reproduced.
8. 8No company-wide 2026 salary-hike announcement, pay freeze or attrition rate exists in the public record, so those fields are left empty rather than inferred from restructuring activity or executive increases.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-25

Single-date conversion layer for comparability; it ignores payroll-date FX, tax, purchasing power, benefits valuation and hedging. Compensation intelligence, not legal, tax, investment, immigration or employment advice.

Source register — 18 sources

3M publishes regional headcount only. There is no city-level split for Maplewood, Bangalore, Sydney or any other site, so no office in this report is ranked by employee count. The 2023 programme announced 6,000 position reductions and ultimately affected roughly 7,000 positions worldwide, which means the year-on-year movement reflects organisational action rather than voluntary attrition.