How AMD Pays

Technical ladder — Graduate through Corporate Fellow

Management ladder — Manager through Corporate Vice President

Executive — disclosed proxy tier

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• AMD's career site, job postings and filings expose titles such as Engineer II, Senior Engineer, MTS, SMTS, PMTS and Fellow, but AMD has never published a single global grade chart or a title-to-grade mapping.
• The L5 through L10 numbers are Levels.fyi normalization. Presenting them as official AMD bands is the most common analytical mistake made with this company, and this report shows them only as a secondary market reference.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for software and silicon engineering and progressively less precise for operations, sales, marketing and corporate functions, where equivalent scope can be placed differently.
• A complete post-acquisition harmonization map between legacy AMD and legacy Xilinx titles is not publicly disclosed. Public salary data still contains adaptive-computing and legacy title variants, so this report normalizes by scope rather than assuming one-to-one grade conversion.
• Corporate Vice President, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers rather than claiming a numeric band.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Santa Clara

AMD publishes office addresses but not site-by-site headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The FY2025 Form 10-K identifies major operations including Austin, San Jose, Shanghai, Markham, Longmont, Dublin, Singapore, Bengaluru and Hyderabad; the careers directory adds Santa Clara, Bellevue, Boxborough, Fort Collins, Calgary, Cambridge, Munich, Penang, Beijing, Taipei and Dubai. No New Zealand corporate location appeared on the reviewed AMD locations page, so none is modelled here.

Santa Clara anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Santa Clara column is the anchor. Engineer II, SMTS, PMTS and Director carry direct United States market observations; the remaining rows are interpolated between them and then calibrated to the Santa Clara market.
• The direct anchors are a $157,000 total at software L5, $315,000 at software L8, $328,400 at principal software and $487,000 at software engineering director. Santa Clara sits above the national medians, which is why the anchor column reads higher than those raw observations.
• The principal row can read only modestly above SMTS because grant timing and a mixed software and hardware sample dominate the public median. Hardware principal packages run near $405,100, well above the software figure used here.
• Bengaluru is the strongest non-United States observation set, with a directly reported Engineer II package at 2.424 million rupees and an SMTS package at 9.881 million rupees.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 11 percent of the Santa Clara anchor at the graduate rung and rises towards 50 percent at the top of the technical ladder, because senior Indian packages carry a much larger equity component.
• The Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer rows are proxy disclosures shown for comparison only. They are global executive values and are not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 107 million shares available against 153 million authorized means about 30.1 percent of the authorization had been issued or committed on a simple reserve measure. That complement is not a clean cumulative-utilisation rate, because plan share accounting includes forfeiture recycling and award-counting rules.
• Before the May 2026 amendment the proxy recorded 42.794 million shares available at 16 March 2026, alongside 34.893 million shares underlying outstanding awards counted at maximum performance-unit payout rather than target.
• The three-year average burn rate for 2023 to 2025 was 0.99 percent, made up of 1.06 percent in 2023, 0.87 percent in 2024 and 1.04 percent in 2025.
• Unrecognised stock compensation at the FY2025 close was about $3.5 billion with a weighted-average recognition period of about 2.64 years, and time-based restricted stock units that vested during 2025 had an aggregate fair value of about $1.8 billion.
• Roughly 32,200 employees plus eight non-employee directors were eligible under internal guidelines in March 2026, which broadly matches headcount. Eligibility is not the same as an annual grant entitlement, and AMD publishes no level-by-level grant matrix.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

There is no single vesting cadence for every AMD award and the plan allows variation by grant. Public employee packages commonly describe four-year restricted stock unit vesting with 25 percent after the first anniversary and 6.25 percent quarterly thereafter, and the FY2025 executive time-based units and options follow the same 25 percent then quarterly pattern. Performance restricted stock units are a three-year cliff on committee certification instead. Historical options generally vested over four years and expired after seven, and the amended 2026 plan requires a minimum one-year vesting period for at least 95 percent of awarded shares.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Equity is broad but not guaranteed. About 32,200 employees were eligible under internal guidelines in March 2026, yet AMD publishes no minimum eligible level, no standard grant table and no promise that every eligible employee receives an annual award.
• Annualized stock value in public samples rises from roughly $16,000 a year at Engineer II to about $50,000 at MTS, $72,000 at SMTS and $105,000 at software Fellow. Hardware runs far richer at the top, with roughly $106,000 at principal, $177,000 at Fellow and $305,000 at Senior Fellow.
• Bengaluru packages show the same shape at a smaller scale, with roughly 0.46 million rupees of annualized stock at Engineer II, 1.38 million at Senior Engineer and about 1.95 to 1.97 million at MTS and SMTS.
• Performance restricted stock units and stock options are visibly concentrated at the executive tier. Employee packages in public data are described through annualized restricted stock unit value alone, and no public source shows broad employee option grants.
• A high share price compresses grant share counts. The same dollar grant buys far fewer shares at the August 2026 market price than at the $163.60 conversion price used in the proxy award-design table, so grant-date value rather than share count is the meaningful comparison.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Santa Clara

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $475.25 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

Darren Grasby's FY2025 package is the least comparable of the five. It includes special promotion and retention awards of 21,253 performance units and 21,253 restricted stock units on top of the standard annual grant, and his compensation carries local-currency treatment that the proxy handles separately, which is why his $18.18 million total exceeds the Chief Technology Officer's. The 2026 chief executive value creation award sits entirely outside the Summary Compensation Table for FY2025 and will land in a later fiscal year at whatever value the committee certifies between 0 and 200 percent of the $75 million target.

Board compensation framework

FY2025 totals for continuing directors generally ran between about $429,400 and $513,700, with Nora Denzel the highest at $513,700. Michael J. Durcan's $70,000 reflects a partial year rather than a different pay design. No stock options were granted to directors.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The pay cycle is the one part of the process with real visibility. Eligible annual cash bonuses are generally paid in late March or early April across the United States, India, Australia and United Kingdom guides, and restricted stock units are described as part of the annual merit cycle. A single global salary-review effective date is not published, and no company-wide mid-year correction or market-adjustment policy was found. The FY2025 Form 10-K states that a majority of new leaders were promoted internally, which supports internal mobility as an explicit strategy without quantifying promotion rates.

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 headcount. One cites the FY2025 Form 10-K rounding of approximately 31,000 employees and the other cites the corporate-responsibility data table figure of 31,359 plus a 45,842 total workforce including contractors. This report uses 31,359 because it is the more precise disclosed figure and is traceable to a named table.
2. 2The bundles use different foreign-exchange snapshots for the same 25 August 2026 date, quoting 95.72028 and 95.4075 rupees to the dollar. This report standardises on the Reserve Bank of Australia cross-rate set at 95.72028, because it is the only snapshot that covers all eleven currencies used here including the Central Bank of the UAE dirham rate.
3. 3The share price references differ. One bundle uses a $475.25 web market snapshot on 25 August 2026 and the other a verified $456.75 close on 24 August 2026. This report uses $475.25 for illustrative share conversion and treats neither as a grant-date fair value.
4. 4The bundles disagree on the executive incentive target above the chief executive line. One models the senior and executive vice president tier at 150 percent of base while the proxy-traceable figure for named executives is 125 percent. This report uses 125 percent, which reconciles with the disclosed payouts at the 121 percent company factor to within half a percentage point.
5. 5Intel's peer chief executive total is quoted as $92.99 million in one bundle and $93.24 million in the other, both attributed to the 2026 proxy. This report uses $92.99 million and flags the difference rather than averaging.
6. 6The March 2026 chief executive sale is recorded differently. One bundle shows 85,000 shares at about $198.77 on 12 March 2026 and the other shows 16,228 shares at $197.42 for a 10 March trade date. These are most likely different tranches or filings of the same plan; this report carries the larger disclosed line and notes the second.
7. 7Per-city H-1B petition counts are not published for any AMD worksite, so the record column in the city table reads zero. The percentile figures themselves come from 2025 labour condition application records.
8. 8Sydney, and by extension the whole Australian model, rests on one small-sample hardware MTS observation. Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Penang, Dubai, Calgary and Dublin have no direct AMD salary anchor at all and are calibrated purely from regional market factors.
9. 9AMD discloses no geographic revenue split in either reviewed bundle, so no regional revenue panel is shown. The only disclosed geographic signal is the employee mix of 48 percent Americas, 45 percent Asia Pacific and 7 percent EMEA.
10. 10No company-wide 2025 or 2026 salary-hike percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, campus offer revision or off-cycle correction policy was located in either bundle.

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

Growth accelerated sharply after the 2024 restructuring, which had cut roughly 4 percent of the workforce and was substantially completed in the first quarter of 2025 at a cumulative charge of about $186 million including $113 million of severance and benefits. FY2025 research and development expense rose about 25 percent with headcount a major driver. The broader workforce including temporary workers and contractors was 45,842 at the FY2025 close, and the geographic employee mix was 48 percent Americas, 45 percent Asia Pacific including China and Japan, and 7 percent EMEA. AMD does not publish city-level headcount.