How Air Products Pays

Technical and operations ladder — R0 through R3

Management ladder — R4 through R5

Executive and board — R6 through R8

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Air Products job postings, visa filings and salary datasets expose titles such as Engineer, Lead Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior Principal Engineer, Associate Director and Regional President, but the company has never published a numeric grade chart to attach them to.
• The taxonomy is most reliable for engineering and project roles, where visa filings and postings overlap, and least reliable for operations, commercial and shared-services roles, where the same title can span very different scopes across sites.
• Operations careers follow a separate route from professional engineering: operator or technician to lead technician to supervisor to site or production manager to regional operations leadership. That route is confirmed by current Edmonton and Rotterdam postings.
• Vice President, Senior Vice President, Executive Vice President and President are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers rather than claiming a band code.
• The independent director row is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart, as are the two proxy-only executive rows.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Allentown

Air Products does not publish city-level headcount anywhere in its filings, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. Visa worksite records show immigration-sponsored concentration in Allentown, Bethlehem and Houston, but that is a sponsorship signal rather than a headcount proxy.

Allentown anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Allentown column is the anchor. The R1 engineer and R2 senior engineer rows come from public United States total pay samples of $93,000 to $134,000 and $121,000 to $166,000, and the R4 manager row from a $113,000 to $167,000 sample.
• Allentown is also the largest historical H-1B worksite with 35 records and an aggregate median of about $121,660, which brackets the engineer and senior engineer anchors from below because visa wages are base only.
• Bethlehem sits in the same Lehigh Valley labour market as the headquarters but its visa aggregate median of about $93,309 reflects a more junior role mix, so its factor is set at 0.92 rather than parity.
• India total pay runs at roughly 13 percent of the Allentown anchor at engineer level and rises towards 30 percent at manager level, because Indian senior packages close the gap much faster than Indian entry packages do.
• The executive vice president and chief executive rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison only. They are global values rather than a local pay range in any selected city, and they are excluded from the range chart.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• At 30 September 2025 the shareholder-approved plans had 918,597 shares remaining available for future grants against 809,386 securities to be issued on outstanding awards.
• A simple utilisation percentage cannot be stated from that table alone, because the original authorised pool and the share-counting ratios across award types are not disclosed. The bundle records this as not publicly determinable rather than estimating it.
• Against roughly 21,300 employees, 918,597 available shares is a small reserve by technology standards, which is consistent with a programme aimed at a few hundred management employees rather than the whole workforce.
• The retirement plan stock holding of about 1.5 million shares is larger than the entire remaining long-term incentive reserve, which is a useful reminder of where broad-based employee ownership actually sits at Air Products.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Executive restricted stock units generally vest in a single instalment on the fourth anniversary of grant rather than on an annual or quarterly cadence, which makes an Air Products award materially back-loaded compared with a technology company's four-year graded schedule. Performance shares are a separate three-year cliff settled on committee certification of relative total shareholder return, and they can pay anywhere between nothing and 200 percent of target. No vesting schedule is published for the non-executive management population.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The proxy frames long-term incentive participation as executive officers plus approximately 300 other management employees. There is no public evidence of routine company stock grants to engineers, technicians or operators.
• The minimum eligible title or grade is not disclosed anywhere. This report models equity as beginning at the director row, which is a judgement about where roughly 300 people plausibly sit in a 21,300 person company, not a company statement.
• Some senior technical leaders may sit in the management long-term incentive population, but no source identifies which technical titles qualify.
• Normal grants are made on the first New York Stock Exchange business day in December, with recruiting and retention awards as the stated exception. Francesco Maione received a June 2025 retention award of 10,982 restricted stock units worth about $3.0 million in connection with his transfer to the United States.
• There is no Air Products employee stock purchase plan in any reviewed source. The broad-based ownership route for United States employees is the retirement plan rather than a discounted purchase programme.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Allentown

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $306.24 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

Two FY2025 lines need care. Seifi Ghasemi's $23.4 million total includes about $7.4 million of separation-related items and $15.5 million of stock awards, and it should not be compared mechanically with an ongoing chief executive package. Francesco Maione's $995,410 of other compensation is dominated by $845,714 reported under the international assignment policy, covering housing, tax preparation and tax equalisation on his transfer to the United States. Neither figure describes recurring local pay. Selected executives also received discretionary cash bonuses of $150,000 to $648,000 in a year when the formulaic annual incentive paid nothing, which is a visible use of retention cash rather than plan mechanics.

Board compensation framework

The FY2025 standard package of a $130,000 cash retainer plus a $160,000 deferred stock award gives a $290,000 base directorship, rising to $380,000 for the Chair and $330,000 for the Vice Chair before committee chair retainers. Directors receive no stock options, and their deferred stock units are bookkeeping accruals rather than purchases.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Timing is the one part of the executive calendar with real visibility. Executive salary changes typically take effect with the first payroll period of the calendar year, annual incentive payouts follow the fiscal year end and committee determination, and normal long-term incentive grants are made on the first New York Stock Exchange business day in December, with recruiting and retention awards as the stated exception. Nothing equivalent is published for the general employee population.

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 bundles disagree on the FY2025 annual incentive outcome. The earlier one records a flat 0 percent for current named executives; the later 26 August revision splits it into 0 percent for the adjusted earnings-per-share cohort and a 90 percent factor worth $630,000 for the Americas President. This report follows the later revision because it is traceable to the same proxy and is internally consistent with the 81 percent corporate-function figure.
2. 2The bundles also differ on the retirement plan share count. The FY2025 Form 10-K reports 1,501,888 employee stock ownership plan shares at 30 September 2025 while the later Form 11-K reports 1,483,987 total plan-held shares at 31 December 2025. These measure different things and this report shows both rather than treating the later figure as an updated employee stock ownership balance.
3. 3No Allentown observation exists for operator, technician, graduate, lead engineer, principal engineer, senior manager, director, vice president or senior vice president. Those anchor rows are modeled by interpolation between the three observed United States points and the disclosed named-executive averages, and they carry a modeled evidence class for that reason.
4. 4Equity is modeled as beginning at the director row. Air Products never names the lowest eligible title, so this is a judgement about where approximately 300 people plausibly sit in a 21,300 person company, not a disclosure.
5. 5Houston's calibration is a compromise. The public mechanical engineer sample reads slightly below Allentown while the visa worksite median reads about 13 percent above it, on six records. The factor is set at parity and both readings are recorded here.
6. 6Rotterdam is held flat rather than given a seniority slope, because its junior samples read high relative to Allentown and its principal samples read low. The likely cause is the thirteenth month and holiday allowance inflating junior quotes, but the sample cannot prove it.
7. 7MyVisaJobs and H1BGrader report FY2025 central wage values of $145,279 and about $122,200 respectively. Neither is treated as correct and no average is taken.
8. 8Air Products discloses no geographic revenue split in either bundle, so this report omits a regional revenue panel entirely rather than repurposing it.
9. 9No multi-year headcount series was located. Only the approximately 21,300 figure at 30 September 2025 and the roughly 75 percent non-United States split are available, so the headcount panel shows a single-year composition rather than a trend.
10. 10No company-wide salary increase percentage, pay freeze, salary cut or campus offer revision was located in any source, and the Q3 FY2026 project exit charges must not be read as evidence of one.

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

Air Products discloses a single headcount figure and a single geographic split rather than a multi-year series, so no trend line can be drawn from the filings. It publishes no attrition rate at any frequency, and no city-level headcount anywhere. The one geographic signal beyond the 75 percent split is visa worksite concentration in Allentown, Bethlehem and Houston, which measures sponsorship rather than employment.