How American Electric Power Pays

Salary grade ladder — SG3 through SG11

Leadership ladder — Director through SVP

Executive and board — EVP through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Salary grade 3 is the lowest public corporate grade captured. That is a limit of the posting evidence, not a claim that AEP has no lower-paid or apprentice classifications; grades 1 and 2 were not found in any authoritative source.
• Roughly 24 percent of the workforce is union-represented, and those 4,261 employees sit on collectively bargained wage schedules with step progression, overtime and shift differentials that the exempt grade ladder does not describe.
• Some AEP support postings carry SP20-series grade codes, such as SP20-004 for a work scheduling assistant at $52,488 to $65,610, which do not map cleanly onto the numeric professional grades.
• Grades 12 through 14 and a companywide vice president or senior vice president salary schedule are not public anywhere in the reviewed record, so those rows are explicitly market bridges.
• AEP was materially reshaped by the June 2000 merger with Central and South West Corporation, but no current public source establishes a surviving dual-band legacy structure. Operating company, bargaining unit and local labour market matter more than merger heritage.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Columbus

AEP does not publish city-level headcount, so this catalogue ranks markets by operating-company employment and by the worksites that appear in labour condition applications rather than by office size. Columbus and New Albany together account for 110 of the 123 worksite entries in the visa record.

Columbus anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Columbus column is the anchor. Salary grades 3 through 11 and the director row come from AEP job postings captured in August 2026, and the midpoint of each published range is used as the anchor median.
• AEP Service Corporation is the largest disclosed employing entity at 6,994 people, which is 39.8 percent of the workforce, and it drives much of the central Ohio corporate concentration. The company does not publish city-level headcount, so that figure cannot be assigned wholly to Columbus.
• Indiana Michigan Power at 2,152 employees, AEP Texas at 1,730, Appalachian Power at 1,682, AEP Ohio at 1,556, SWEPCO at 1,392 and the Public Service Company of Oklahoma at 1,150 make up most of the remainder, with Kentucky Power at 304, Wheeling Power at 229 and Kingsport Power at 48.
• The vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president and chief executive rows are enterprise values rather than a local pay range in any selected city. Applying a city factor to them is a display convention, not a claim about where those officers are paid.
• India and Australia are shown as not applicable rather than populated. AEP held international assets decades ago, including in Australia, but no current material employee or payroll footprint was found in either country, so rupee and Australian dollar figures anywhere in this record are currency translations of United States pay only.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• At 31 December 2025 AEP disclosed 2,199,734 outstanding rights and 8,909,934 shares remaining available for future issuance across its equity compensation plans. That is a capacity measure across several award types, not an employee stock ownership plan utilisation rate.
• Roughly 1,090,066 shares, about 10.9 percent of the 2024 plan's 10 million share authorisation, had been consumed by the end of 2025, subject to plan accounting and share recycling rules.
• The employee stock purchase plan carries its own separate 2,000,000 share authorisation, so it does not draw on the long-term incentive reserve and its capacity should not be added to the 8,909,934 figure.
• ESPP utilisation is not yet meaningful. The plan was only approved in April 2026, so no participation rate, purchase volume or match cost has been reported.

Equity plan capacity and grant design

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Named-executive restricted stock units vest in roughly equal annual tranches over three years on the 21 February cycle, which is the schedule shown above. Performance shares are a single three-year cliff settled after the committee certifies the cycle, so they carry no intermediate vesting at all. The chief executive's December 2025 retention award is on a different clock entirely: $10 million of performance shares measured on annual relative total shareholder return through 31 December 2030 and $5 million of restricted stock units on a single 31 December 2030 cliff. The chief financial officer's $5 million retention award carries a four-year cliff. Employee stock purchase plan match shares are fully vested when credited.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The clearest public equity rule at AEP is an exclusion, not an inclusion: salary grade 11 and above are initially outside the employee stock purchase plan, along with Section 16 officers, temporary staff, non-United States payroll and represented employees whose collective bargaining agreement does not cover the plan.
• That creates an equity-access cliff around grade 11. Grades 3 through 10 can access the capped ESPP match, director postings state long-term incentive participation explicitly, and grade 11 sits between the two with no disclosed equity mechanism at all.
• The 2024 Long-Term Incentive Plan is legally open to all employees and directors, but every disclosed grant in the reviewed record went to a named executive or a non-employee director. Legal eligibility is not evidence of a routine grant.
• The $1,000 figure is the maximum company match, not the employee's purchase limit and not a free share award. At $122.17 a share it corresponds to about 8.2 matched shares, and the employee must make qualifying purchases at market price to earn it.
• No broad employee option or stock appreciation right programme was identified. The 2024 plan permits both, but the reviewed 2025 named-executive grants were performance shares and restricted stock units only, and permission is not evidence of activity.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Columbus

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $122.17 reference price at 25 August 2026 and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Four of the five named executives show partial-year salary lines for 2025 because they joined during the year, so their salary columns cannot be read as annual rates. Their cash columns also carry sizeable hiring bonuses that sit outside the annual incentive plan: $1,230,000 for Douglas A. Cannon, $1,187,000 for Robert B. Berntsen and $1,100,000 for Alicia R. Knapp. Trevor I. Mihalik's January 2025 appointment agreement set a $975,000 base against the $930,000 actually paid in 2025, a 100 percent annual incentive target, a $3.8 million initial annual long-term incentive target and $1.5 million of new-hire restricted stock units. No named executive received a base salary increase during 2025; the 2025 proxy had reported 2024 increases averaging 3.7 percent effective 1 April 2024, and neither fact should be generalised into a companywide merit cycle.

Board compensation framework

A standard full-year non-employee director package was $300,000 before committee or leadership retainers, and disclosed 2025 totals for standard directors ran to roughly $300,685 to $325,685. Sara Martinez Tucker was the outlier at $684,018, reflecting a one-time award and increased responsibilities during the year.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The engineering ladder is the most reliable external progression signal AEP offers. Postings put minimum experience at roughly zero years for the Engineer Associate at grade 6, two to four or more years at grade 7, four to six or more years at grade 8, and about eight or more years with a bachelor's degree at grade 9, or fewer with an advanced degree. Those are minimum qualification anchors for external hiring rather than automatic promotion clocks. Role family, professional licensing, operating-company need, union agreements, succession planning and external hiring can all move an individual faster or slower. In 2025 AEP recorded 1,206 opportunities or promotions, a 6.86 percent rate against year-end headcount, up from 902 and 5.52 percent in 2024 and 1,081 and 6.27 percent in 2023.

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 quote different share-price references: $122.17 for 25 August 2026 in one and $121.98 for the 24 August 2026 close in the other. This report uses $122.17 and flags that every share-equivalent figure moves with the choice.
2. 2Exchange rates differ slightly between bundles: 95.4125 against 95.4075 rupees to the dollar and 1.398574 against 1.39836 Australian dollars. The newer dated Reuters and XE snapshots are used. Neither matters much because AEP has no non-United States payroll.
3. 3The two bundles describe different slices of the grade spine. One reconstructs grades 3 through 11 plus a director row; the other exposes an SP20-004 support grade at $52,488 to $65,610 and grades 6 through 11 with named engineering titles. The overlapping grades agree to within a few hundred dollars, so both are treated as the same underlying posting evidence.
4. 4The 2023 annual incentive score appears as 56.1 percent of target in one bundle and as not extracted in the other. The 56.1 percent figure is traceable to the prior proxy and is used here, with the reason for the collapse stated alongside it.
5. 5The chief executive's non-cash residual is split as a $35,685 pension value change plus $280,288 of all other compensation in one bundle and combined as $315,973 in the other. The split version reconciles to the disclosed $36,601,524 total and is used.
6. 6The peer chief executive sets differ. One bundle lists Southern, Xcel and Duke; the other adds Entergy, Dominion and Exelon. All six are included here because each is traceable to a named peer proxy statement.
7. 7The H-1B record is the largest quantitative disagreement in the bundles: 112 certified applications over FY2021 to FY2025 with a $115,000 median in one aggregate against 34 FY2025 applications with a $130,000 median and $128,518 mean in another, plus a third showing 33 certified and one certified-withdrawn. All three are shown rather than reconciled, because the difference is entity-resolution rather than a factual dispute.
8. 8Education reimbursement is quoted as up to $5,250 a year on the careers page and as $5,250 for undergraduate or certificate study plus $7,500 for advanced degrees in the 2024 sustainability report. Both figures are shown because they may describe different programme tiers rather than contradicting each other.
9. 9Employee review sites describe the 401(k) match as 5 percent while the Form 11-K formula caps at 4.5 percent of eligible compensation. The filing controls and the shorthand is wrong.
10. 10Total compensation in the source bundles adds a notional 8 to 15 percent benefit value on top of base, bonus and equity. That loading is stripped out of every band row here so that base plus bonus plus equity reconciles to total, which makes these totals lower than the bundles' published total-reward envelopes.
11. 11Only 13 United States markets carry a sourced scenario factor. Other AEP locations exist, including the Cook Nuclear engineering site at Bridgman, Michigan and the Kentucky Power and Wheeling Power service areas, but no factor was published for them and none was invented.

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 — 22 sources

The 2024 dip is the single most important thing to understand about AEP's workforce numbers. Reading 2023 straight against 2025 would show mild growth and hide a voluntary severance programme that took out roughly 920 net positions and pushed turnover to 15 percent before the company hired back past its starting point. Of the 17,581 employees at the end of 2025, 4,261 are union-represented and 6,994 sit inside AEP Service Corporation, the largest single employing entity.