How Abbott Pays

Professional and operations ladder — AB1 through AB8

Leadership ladder — AB9 through AB11

Executive and board — AB12, CEO and directors

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Job Grade 16 and Job Grade 17 appear in current public Abbott postings, which proves a grade system exists but is nowhere near enough to reconstruct a full ladder from intern to chief executive.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for technical, regulatory and technology roles and progressively less precise for manufacturing, commercial and field-sales work, where Abbott can place equivalent scope differently by division.
• Abbott has absorbed St. Jude Medical, Alere and, in March 2026, Exact Sciences. No public filing shows how legacy grades were harmonised into one architecture, and subsidiary legal names persist in visa and Form 4 datasets.
• Vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president and group president are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers.
• Abbott India Limited is a separately listed affiliate with its own statutory pay disclosures. Its grades and its managing director's remuneration are not the parent company's ladder.
• The non-employee director row is a governance package, not an employment band, and is excluded from the range chart.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Abbott Park

Abbott publishes no city-by-city employee census, so this catalogue does not rank offices by headcount. The only country-level signals in the sources are more than 41,000 employees in the United States, nearly 3,000 in Ireland across ten sites, more than 2,000 in the United Kingdom and 3,679 permanent employees at the separately listed Abbott India Limited.

Abbott Park anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Abbott Park column is the anchor. AB3 through AB7 are calibrated on Levels.fyi Abbott role medians running from $94,600 for Software Engineer I to $191,000 for Staff Software Engineer, with Program Manager at $140,000, Product Manager at $178,000 and Regulatory Affairs at $120,000.
• AB1, AB2, AB8, AB9 and AB10 have no direct public observation and are modelled from the research bundle's United States blueprint. They are planning envelopes, not benchmarks.
• Alameda and Santa Clara sit 15 percent above the anchor and Orlando 10 percent below, which is the widest United States spread in the model. Sylmar files its visa records under the St. Jude Medical legal entity rather than Abbott Laboratories.
• India runs at roughly 13 to 14 percent of the Abbott Park base at the junior bands, and the two Indian manufacturing sites at Goa and Baddi sit lower again at 9 to 10 percent. Abbott India Limited separately reports 3,679 permanent employees, which is not the whole of Abbott's Indian workforce.
• The AB12, chief executive and director 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 single utilisation percentage is not comparable across the 2017 and 2026 programs because the 2026 program reset the authorisation and changed how full-value awards consume the reserve. The honest disclosed facts are about 51 million shares left under the 2017 plan at the 2025 year end, 140 million newly authorised for 2026 and 15 million reserved for the non-US purchase plan.
• Abbott had not published a post-approval utilisation table for the 2026 program by the research cut-off, so any current utilisation figure would be speculative.
• Grant volume under the old plan in FY2025 was 1,486,579 options, 365,499 restricted stock awards and 4,439,430 restricted stock units. The first half of 2026 ran higher, at 2,000,814 options, 449,237 restricted stock awards and 4,999,652 restricted stock units.
• At 30 June 2026 there were 22,967,126 options outstanding, of which 19,455,098 were exercisable, at weighted-average exercise prices of $95.21 and $90.62. Because Abbott still grants options, an employee's outcome depends on the share price clearing the strike, not only on vesting.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Options under the incentive stock program generally become exercisable in one-third instalments after each of the first three years and carry a maximum ten-year term. Restricted stock awards and restricted stock units generally run three years, and the Indian affiliate's parent-company restricted stock units follow the same one-third annual pattern. Performance restricted shares granted to named executives run a three-year term against a minimum return-on-equity hurdle, described in the proxy as a 15 percent adjusted return on equity, with no more than one third able to vest in any single year. The 2026 program adds a general one-year minimum vesting rule for all new awards, subject to a 5 percent exception pool.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The single most useful equity fact Abbott publishes is the 2025 Form 10-K statement that the global long-term incentive programme is generally available beginning at manager level. The word generally matters: it is neither a guarantee for every manager nor a bar on exceptional grants below that point.
• That threshold is the only public part. Abbott publishes no standard grant table, no grant value by band and no country schedule, so the AB3 to AB10 grant midpoints used in this report are modelled from the research bundle and clearly labelled as such.
• Modelled annual grant ranges run $0 to $3,000 at AB3, $2,000 to $12,000 at AB5, $10,000 to $60,000 at AB7, $75,000 to $300,000 at AB9 and $250,000 to $900,000 at AB10. At the $116.67 reference price those translate to roughly 17 to 104 shares at AB5 and 647 to 2,592 shares at AB9.
• Options are still a live instrument at Abbott, which is unusual among large-cap employers in 2026. The chief executive's 2025 long-term incentive was split evenly between options and performance restricted shares, so half of the headline value only pays if the share price rises above the strike.
• The non-US employee stock purchase plan is legally broad while the incentive program is legally broad but economically selective. Broad eligibility under the 2026 program should not be read as universal annual restricted stock units.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Abbott Park

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $116.67 reference price at 24 August 2026 close and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The 2025 incentive outcomes are the most instructive part of the disclosure. Lisa Earnhardt, Daniel Salvadori and Christopher Scoggins all carried a 115 percent target on salaries within $70,000 of each other, and their payouts ranged from $388,200 to $1,283,400 because the division scorecards diverged. Pension and deferred-compensation movements also distort the totals: Christopher Scoggins' $1,213,176 pension change is larger than Daniel Salvadori's entire annual incentive, which is why the proxy also publishes totals excluding the pension change.

Board compensation framework

Actual total director compensation varied by role and by the timing of elections during the year, and this report models a $336,000 package as the $126,000 annualised cash fee plus the roughly $210,000 restricted stock unit award. Committee and chair service pushes several directors above that.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one hard pay-movement number in the sources comes from India, where company law forces disclosure: Abbott India Limited reported a 16.90 percent rise in median remuneration and a 9.10 percent average salary increase for employees other than managerial personnel in FY2025-26 across 3,679 permanent employees. That is a single affiliate in a single high-inflation market and is not a proxy for Abbott's global merit budget. Executive bonuses are determined after the year end and paid in February in the proxy examples, but that cadence should not be generalised to the wider workforce.

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 two research bundles use different foreign-exchange snapshots for the same 25 August 2026 date, for example 95.720280 against 95.4075 rupees to the dollar. This report standardises on the bundle whose rates are traceable to Reserve Bank of Australia cross-rates, which changes converted values by well under half a percent.
2. 2The bundles disagree on several United States city factors: Alameda at 1.15 against 1.18, Sylmar at 1.08 against 1.12, Columbus at 0.92 against 0.88, Austin at 0.98 against 0.95 and Plymouth at 1.00 against 0.95. This report uses the first bundle's set because it expresses every city against the Abbott Park anchor directly rather than against a per-country base.
3. 3The two bundles build entirely different ladders, AB1 to AB12 against A0 to A8, and their United States anchors are not comparable row by row. This report uses the twelve-band ladder because it is the one with a full location matrix behind it, and folds the second bundle's evidence in as calibration rather than as rows.
4. 4The first bundle holds India, Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica flat at their junior factor through AB8 and then jumps to a global corporate floor at AB9. That step cannot be represented as a single factor, so this report interpolates a level-dependent factor calibrated to match the director row. Mid-ladder cells in those four markets therefore sit above the bundle's own flat figure and should be treated as the softest numbers in the model.
5. 5The bundles disagree on the FY2026 H-1B picture: 75 applications and a roughly $135,000 median in one, 47 applications and a $140,000 median in the other. Both are preserved separately in the visa section rather than averaged.
6. 6City-level H-1B percentiles come from two incompatible corpora. The MyVisaJobs-derived table carries quartiles for five cities; the Ellis corpus carries a median with an observed minimum and maximum for eleven. Where the Ellis figures are used, the outer columns are the observed extremes rather than true quartiles, and each row says so.
7. 7Abbott's 2025 restructuring charge of $287.00 million is disclosed without any workforce breakdown, so it cannot be read as evidence of a salary freeze, a pay cut or a headcount action of any particular size.
8. 8The August 2026 headline of 122,000 employees and the 2025 year-end figure of roughly 115,000 are not measured on the same basis, and the Exact Sciences acquisition sits between them. The increase should not be read as organic hiring.
9. 9Abbott discloses no geographic revenue split in either research bundle, so no regional revenue panel is shown rather than repurposing the panel for something else.
10. 10No companywide 2026 salary hike percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, campus-offer revision or off-cycle correction was located in any source. The only pay-movement figures anywhere in the set are Abbott India's 16.90 percent median-remuneration rise and 9.10 percent non-managerial average increase.

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 — 15 sources

Abbott publishes no attrition rate at any level, no city headcount and no annual headcount series in a form that can be trended cleanly, so the three points above are snapshots on different bases rather than a growth curve. The only granular workforce numbers anywhere in the sources are country-level: more than 41,000 in the United States, nearly 3,000 in Ireland across ten sites and more than 2,000 in the United Kingdom.