How Ameriprise Financial Pays

Professional ladder — B0 through B3

Management ladder — M1 through M2

Executive and board — L1 through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The B0 to E labels are an analytical interface for comparison and must never be presented as an Ameriprise grade code. No public filing, careers page or job posting exposes a numbered grade.
• Ameriprise runs two materially different labour markets under one brand. Corporate and wealth roles and Columbia Threadneedle investment roles price differently, so a Director title is not a universal level.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for United States technology and finance roles, where posted salary ranges and labour condition application wages both exist, and least reliable for wealth-management sales, investment leadership and general operations.
• Ameriprise separated from American Express in 2005 and Columbia Threadneedle carries legacy Columbia Management and Threadneedle structures. Filings describe common incentive governance but no harmonised employee grade framework.
• Independent franchise advisors are business owners paid 72 to 91 percent of Gross Dealer Concession. They are not an employee band and are excluded from every row in this ladder.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Minneapolis

Ameriprise discloses total global employees but never a city or country headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by size. A secondary Great Place to Work profile has described the India platform growing past 3,500 employees; that figure is not in the latest annual report and is treated as secondary rather than definitive.

Minneapolis anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Minneapolis is the anchor because it is the headquarters and the only market with two independent evidence streams: posted United States salary ranges and Department of Labor labour condition application wages, of which 204 historical records sit at that worksite alone.
• The B2 anchor of $100,000 base and $110,000 total is the best-evidenced cell in the report. Posted senior technical ranges run about $100,000 to $160,000 and the Minneapolis visa wage median sits at about $113,000.
• The five United States city factors are flat across the ladder: New York 1.15, Boston 1.12, Minneapolis 1.00, Charlotte 0.95 and Las Vegas 0.92. Boston and New York carry the Columbia Threadneedle and capital-markets role mix.
• India shows strong level-dependent compression. Gurugram base runs at roughly 10 percent of the Minneapolis anchor at B0 and rises towards 25 percent at the senior vice president tier, because the nominal gap narrows as scope becomes scarce rather than because Indian junior pay is close to United States junior pay.
• Dubai runs the opposite way. Base sits slightly below Minneapolis at entry level and rises to roughly 1.3 times at the Vice President and Senior Vice President tiers, reflecting an institutional distribution role mix rather than a general labour market.
• The L3 and chief executive rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison. They are global executive values, not 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

• Simple 2005 Plan utilisation was about 79.9 percent at 31 December 2025, calculated as 58.1 million maximum shares less the 11.7 million still available. That is a reserve capacity measure, not the economic dilution from awards currently outstanding.
• Unrecognised share-based compensation cost was approximately $183 million at the 2025 year end, expected to be recognised over an average of about three years.
• The 2025 full-value award roll-forward showed roughly 1.1 million nonvested units at the start of the year, 0.3 million granted, 0.1 million deferred, 0.7 million vested and 0.8 million outstanding at the year end, at an average 2025 grant-date fair value of $536.71.
• Share-based compensation expense has been flat to slightly falling: $249 million in 2023, $251 million in 2024 and $241 million in 2025, against roughly 13,600 employees. That is a far smaller equity footprint per head than a large-cap technology issuer, which is consistent with equity being concentrated at the top.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule above is the executive restricted stock unit and non-qualified option cadence, one third annually over three years. Performance share units do not follow it at all: they remain fully at risk for three years and then settle in a single instalment at anywhere between 0 and 175 percent of target once the committee certifies performance. Broader employee restricted stock awards under the plan generally run three to four years and some carry a five-year cliff. United Kingdom regulated executives receive deferred share units and deferred options with staged vesting and post-vest holding periods that United States awards do not have.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The clearest public eligibility rule in the whole package is the 10-K statement that performance share units are awarded only to the Executive Leadership Team. Everything below that boundary is inference.
• No recurring equity evidence exists at B0, B1 or B2. Public evidence supports cash and benefits far more clearly than routine restricted stock units for analysts, engineers and operations staff, though isolated inducement awards cannot be ruled out.
• From B3 through M2 the bundle models selective and discretionary awards only, scaled at $0 to $15,000 at lead and architect level, $0 to $20,000 at manager and $0 to $50,000 at senior manager and director. There is no published threshold and no title-by-title grant schedule.
• Vice President and Senior Vice President participation is expected to be selective rather than universal, modeled at $15,000 to $150,000 and $75,000 to $750,000 respectively. A product surface should say selective, not automatic.
• Named executive awards are fully disclosed and run from about $1.03 million for the EMEA chief investment officer to $22.0 million for the chief executive in 2025.
• Non-qualified options are struck at the grant-date market price, so a reported grant-date fair value can be worth far less in intrinsic terms. The chief executive's 24,258 options at a $543.36 exercise price carried $3.99 million of grant-date fair value but only about $389,000 of intrinsic value at the $559.41 reference price.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Minneapolis

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $559.41 reference price at 25 August 2026 close and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Two presentation traps recur in this company's disclosures. First, the proxy publishes both a $31.0 million total direct compensation figure and a $30,828,468 Summary Compensation Table total for the same chief executive year; the difference is grant-date accounting, pension change in value and timing conventions, not two different awards. Second, William Davies is paid under United Kingdom regulated pay rules, with a £350,000 salary, a £300,000 fixed allowance and heavily deferred variable awards including fund-unit deferrals and post-vest holding periods. His $4.31 million total is not comparable line for line with the United States packages above it.

Board compensation framework

The base outside-director package is $320,000, made up of a $110,000 cash retainer and $210,000 of deferred share units, before any committee, chair or presiding-director retainer. Cash retainers may also be deferred. No stock options are granted to directors.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one genuinely verifiable progression signal is at the top. The 2023 to 2025 performance share unit cycle certified at 153 percent, from a 145 percent operating outcome plus 8 percentage points of relative total shareholder return, and the 2025 annual incentive funded at 155 percent on a 4.2 scorecard. Below the Executive Leadership Team there is no published link between a rating, a payout and a pay increase, and no evidence that one exists in public at all.

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 source bundle folded a notional cash, benefits and equity allowance into its total compensation column. That is employer cost rather than pay, so it has been stripped: the B0, B1 and B2 totals here are exactly base plus target bonus and sit about $1,100, $1,375 and $2,000 below the bundle's published figures.
2. 2From B3 through L2 the equity component is the residual between the bundle's published band total and base plus target bonus. Each residual falls inside that band's own discretionary grant scenario, at $1,750 against $0 to $15,000 at B3, $24,500 against $15,000 to $150,000 at L1 and $75,000 against $75,000 to $750,000 at L2, so the totals reconcile without inventing a number. Ameriprise publishes none of it.
3. 3The proxy carries two chief executive totals for the same year, $31.0 million on a total direct compensation basis and $30,828,468 in the Summary Compensation Table. This report leads with the direct-compensation basis, as the bundle does, and preserves the SEC total in the executive notes.
4. 4Individual named executive annual incentive targets are not disclosed. The targets shown here are back-solved by dividing each disclosed award by the 155 percent funding level, which returns exactly $5,000,000 for the chief executive and exactly $1,500,000 for the President of Advice and Wealth Management. The other three are derived, not disclosed.
5. 5The two H-1B aggregators disagree by roughly $30,000. H1BData reports a $113,152 median across 293 multi-year records while MyVisaJobs reports a $143,117 FY2025 average. Both figures are preserved separately because the entity filters and record scopes differ.
6. 6City percentile figures in the visa section are order-statistic anchors reconstructed from the wage distribution, not source-published quartiles, and the Boston, Charlotte and New York samples are six, six and three records.
7. 7The India, Dubai and Auckland factors interpolate linearly by seniority between a junior and a senior anchor, but the underlying curve is convex rather than straight. The interpolated mid-ladder India factors therefore run a few percentage points above the observed ratios at B1 and B2.
8. 8London, Sydney, Singapore and Frankfurt observed factors move without direction across the ladder, so each carries a single flat factor. That is a deliberate refusal to read noise as a compression trend.
9. 9Ameriprise does not publish a geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so this report shows no regional revenue panel rather than repurposing one.
10. 10Auckland is a scenario market with no verified employing entity. Its numbers exist for regional comparison only and should not be used to price a New Zealand offer.
11. 11No company-wide 2025 or 2026 salary hike, pay freeze, salary cut or off-cycle correction was located. Localised Columbia Threadneedle United Kingdom small-cap restructuring in October 2024 is a geography-specific event and does not establish a global compensation action.

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 — 16 sources

The reported workforce has been broadly stable across 2024 and 2025 at about 13,600 people. Ameriprise publishes no quarterly employee count and no split by country, so the only geographic signals available are the verified office footprint and the proxy's statement that India operations generated roughly $260 million of operating cost efficiencies. A secondary profile describing the India platform passing 3,500 employees is not in the latest annual report and is treated as secondary.