How American Tower Pays

Professional ladder — B1 through B6

Leadership ladder — B7 and B8

Executive and board — B9 through the board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• American Tower job postings expose titles such as Associate Property Manager, Portfolio Strategy Analyst, Senior Category Manager, Principal Data Engineer and Senior Manager of Internal Audit, but no public source identifies an internal grade code or a complete promotion ladder.
• Cash ranges overlap heavily across adjacent bands. Property, legal, finance, cybersecurity, data and field engineering roles can price differently at the same nominal seniority, so title alone is an imperfect level signal.
• CoreSite, acquired in 2021, continues to create a specialised United States data-centre talent market around Denver. No public evidence establishes a company-wide legacy band harmonisation programme.
• Senior Vice President, Executive Vice President and President are corporate offices rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers rather than claiming a numeric band.
• The non-management 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 Boston

American Tower does not publish employee headcount by country or by city, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by size. Business-footprint scale points to Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Nigeria and Spain as the largest non-United States exposures, which is a portfolio proxy rather than a headcount ranking.

Boston anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Boston column is the anchor. B1 through B8 medians come from fourteen current American Tower job postings with published base ranges, cross-checked against certified Massachusetts visa wages and employee-reported salary portals.
• B9 and B10 are SEC disclosures rather than models. The B9 row is the mean of the four non-CEO named executive officers in the 2025 Summary Compensation Table, and the B10 row is the chief executive's own row.
• Total compensation for B1 through B8 is target cash only. American Tower discloses that 99 percent of United States employees received an equity award in 2025 but never discloses grant size by band, so no annualized equity value can be attached without inventing one.
• Massachusetts carries the densest evidence in the whole dataset: 17 certified visa rows in Woburn at a $138,709 median, 5 in Westborough at $150,222 and 3 in Boston at $271,843.
• The named executive officer rows are global executive values converted for comparison only. They are not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Prior-plan overhang was 0.79 percent at 23 March 2026, and the proxy estimated potential overhang at 3.36 percent once the 12 million new shares were added. The plan was subsequently approved, so the higher figure now applies.
• Burn rate has fallen steadily, from 0.22 percent in 2023 to 0.18 percent in 2024 and 0.16 percent in 2025, a three-year average of about 0.19 percent. The company estimates roughly ten years of plan duration, which is sensitive to share price, participation, hiring and grant mix.
• Internal policy at 23 March 2026 restricted plan participation to approximately 3,400 employees and directors out of 4,866 employees, which is materially narrower than the plan text allows and can change without disclosure.
• 625,616 restricted stock units were granted and 133,034 performance stock units vested during 2025, but the split of those grants by band, country or function is not disclosed.

Equity participation and plan capacity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Restricted stock units granted from 10 March 2023 onward vest one third on each annual anniversary over three years, with the first tranche one year after grant. Awards granted before that date vest 25 percent annually over four years, so a long-tenured employee can hold both patterns at once. Performance stock units cliff at the end of a three-year performance period on certified results. Non-management director awards vest in full after approximately one year, and legacy options vest in 25 percent cumulative annual increments over a ten-year term.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Eligibility is the strongest public fact and grant size is the weakest. The proxy proves that 99 percent of United States employees and 74 percent of all employees received equity in 2025, but it never publishes a grant range, a share count, a frequency or a performance-unit threshold for any ordinary band.
• Do not read the absence of a number as zero. Every non-executive band in this report shows no annualized equity because none is disclosed, not because none is granted.
• Performance stock units are visible only for named executive officers. Whether the instrument extends below that layer is not publicly established, so a senior director or vice president package cannot be assumed to contain performance units.
• Grant timing is the one part of employee equity with real visibility. The proxy states that annual employee equity grants are made in connection with the annual employee performance review programme conducted each February or March, and both the 2025 and 2026 executive grants were dated 10 March.
• Plan text permits awards to employees, directors, consultants and advisors of the company and its majority-owned subsidiaries, but internal policy at 23 March 2026 narrowed actual participation to about 3,400 people.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Boston

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $178.39 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

Base salaries were frozen in 2025 for every named executive officer other than Eugene Noel, whose adjustment reflected his new role, and that freeze should not be generalised to the full workforce. Olivier Puech's $256,200 of other compensation is the largest such line in the table and reflects his departure arrangements rather than an ongoing perquisite. The company applies stock ownership guidelines of six times base salary for the chief executive, three times for other named executive officers and five times the annual cash retainer for non-management directors, enforced by a 50 percent net-share retention rule until the guideline is met.

Board compensation framework

A director serving on one committee therefore received roughly $340,000 to $350,000 in combined cash and grant-date equity for 2025, and the independent chair materially more. No stock options were granted to directors, and the 2026 Equity Incentive Plan caps total annual non-employee director compensation at $1.5 million subject to stated exceptions.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The executive calendar runs across the whole year: January to March for goal setting, prior-year assessment and pay decisions; April to August for benchmarking, stockholder input and programme review; September to December for design and next-year planning. The Compensation and Human Capital Committee uses an independent consultant and benchmarks roles around the market median while retaining discretion. Base salaries were frozen for the named executive officers other than Eugene Noel in 2025, which is a specific executive decision rather than a workforce policy.

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 disagree on the H-1B median. The Ellis-derived reconstruction of 31 certified 2025 and 2026 rows gives $142,140, while the H1BGrader FY2026 extract of 9 records gives $141,955. Both are preserved here rather than averaged, and the $142,140 figure is used as the headline because it rests on the larger sample.
2. 2The bundles also disagree on labour condition application counts. Ellis reports 20 filings in 2025 while MyVisaJobs reports 21, and the FY2026 counts differ between 16 and 9 depending on the provider refresh date and status methodology. The Ellis series is used for the year-by-year table because it separates certified from withdrawn.
3. 3The B6 and B7 rows carry a visible tension. The modeled target-cash medians of $208,400 and $273,800 sit above employee-reported total pay medians of roughly $185,000 for senior managers and $232,000 for finance directors, even though those reported figures include stock. The modeled rows are kept because they rest on employer postings, but the reported medians are recorded in each row's caveat.
4. 4The performance stock unit weighting changed between cycles. The 2025 design used 50 percent adjusted funds from operations per share, 30 percent return on invested capital and 20 percent relative total shareholder return; the 2026 design uses 40, 30 and 30. Both are disclosed and neither supersedes the other.
5. 5The date of the 2023 performance award settlement is reported inconsistently in the sources, appearing as both 25 February 2026 and 10 March 2026. This report uses 10 March 2026, which matches the annual grant and vesting cadence, and values the settlement using the bundle's own illustration at the 24 August 2026 close.
6. 6American Tower discloses operating segments but no geographic revenue split appears in either bundle, so this report shows no regional revenue panel rather than reconstructing one from portfolio scale.
7. 7No founding year, legal-entity history or fiscal-year-end variation is documented in the bundles beyond the 31 December year end, so those clauses are omitted from the company metadata rather than filled from memory.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-24

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 — 17 sources

The workforce has shrunk by roughly a quarter since 2022, almost entirely through divestiture rather than through reduction in force, and 2025 was the first year of growth. American Tower publishes no headcount by country or city and no attrition rate, so the only geographic signal in the filings is the near-even United States and international split. Business-footprint scale points to Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Nigeria and Spain as the largest non-United States exposures, which is a portfolio proxy rather than an employee ranking.