How Amgen Pays

Professional ladder — GCF 1 through GCF 6B

Leadership ladder — GCF 7 through GCF 10

Executive and board — GCF 11 through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• GCF 4A Senior Associate, GCF 5A Specialist, GCF 6A Senior Specialist and Principal Architect and GCF 6B Associate Director are each confirmed by a named current Amgen careers posting, mostly from the Hyderabad technology centre.
• GCF 11 is confirmed by Thomas Dittrich's employment and expatriate documents filed with the Form 8-K of 19 May 2026, which state the level explicitly alongside a CHF 1.070 million base salary.
• GCF 1 through GCF 3 and GCF 7 through GCF 10 are analytical groupings. Amgen has published neither a global title catalogue nor a level-by-level salary grid for them, and the numbering on those rows should not be quoted as Amgen nomenclature.
• A forensic one-to-one mapping to AbbVie, Gilead, Biogen or Regeneron levels is not publicly disclosed. The only defensible external equivalence is title family, which is why every peer mapping on these rows is expressed that way.
• Amgen acquired Horizon Therapeutics in 2023. Horizon equity plans survive only to settle acquired awards, and no evidence was found of a separate Horizon career-band structure still operating inside Amgen in 2026.
• The non-employee director row is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Thousand Oaks

Amgen does not publish site-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The only site-scale disclosure in any bundle is the Hyderabad technology centre, where Reuters reported roughly 300 staff when the $200 million investment was announced in February 2025 against a stated ambition of about 2,000 by the end of that year. No current Amgen New Zealand employing office was substantiated in any reviewed source, so New Zealand is omitted from this table rather than modelled.

Thousand Oaks anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Thousand Oaks column is the anchor. Eight of the thirteen bands take their base median directly from an employer-posted Amgen salary range for a named role at that site, which is unusually strong evidence for a company that publishes no salary grid.
• South San Francisco is the only United States market with a measured premium, and it is level-dependent: the Associate Scientist example sits about 4.2 percent above Thousand Oaks while the Principal Scientist example sits about 11 percent above it.
• Hyderabad total compensation is fitted across six employee-submitted observations running from an Associate at 0.09 of the Thousand Oaks total to a Senior Manager at 0.29. The line is extrapolated to 0.44 at the top of the ladder, and the directly observed GCF 6A base of 4.8 million rupees sits above the fitted base line.
• Rotkreuz carries the only non-United States executive observation in the whole corpus. Thomas Dittrich's CHF 1.070 million GCF 11 base converts to about $1.334 million, roughly 1.07 times the United States named-executive average base, which is why Switzerland is modelled as level-dependent and only reaches parity at the top.
• GCF 11 and chief executive rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison only. They are global executive values, not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• An indicative ratio of outstanding main-plan rights to outstanding rights plus the remaining reserve is 24.1 percent, calculated as 11,098,368 divided by the sum of 11,098,368 and 35,004,385. That is not Amgen's reported utilisation rate: exercises, cancellations, share withholding, performance-unit outcomes and historical plan activity all sit outside the calculation.
• At the 25 August 2026 reference price of $444.70, the 35,004,385 shares remaining under the main plan represent roughly $15.57 billion of notional capacity. That is an arithmetic illustration, not a cash cost, an accounting liability or a grant commitment.
• Across all listed plans, 38,968,804 shares remained available at the 2025 close, of which the main 2009 Plan accounts for about 90 percent.
• The weighted-average grant-date fair value of 2025 restricted stock units was $273.10 per unit, so a hypothetical 100-unit annual grant carried about $27,310 of grant-date value in that cycle.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Restricted stock units and stock options granted on or after 1 April 2025 generally vest 25 percent on each of the first, second, third and fourth anniversaries. Grants made before that date generally vested in equal instalments on the second, third and fourth anniversaries only, so the change materially front-loaded new awards: a 2026 joiner reaches a quarter of the grant a full year earlier than a 2024 joiner did. Performance units run three-year performance periods and settle in a single instalment on certification, between 0 and 200 percent of target. Non-employee director restricted stock units vest immediately with deferral available.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The eligibility disclosure is broader than most online anecdotes suggest. Amgen states that eligible employees generally receive an annual restricted stock unit grant, so the common claim that stock begins only at Senior Manager should not be treated as policy.
• Award size and type are determined by salary grade and performance level, but Amgen publishes no grade-by-grade share schedule. There is no defensible public answer to what a GCF 4A or GCF 6A grant is worth.
• Instrument, not eligibility, is the clearest hierarchy rule. Certain management-level employees receive annual performance units on top of restricted stock units, and certain executive-level employees receive stock options.
• Certain management and professional employees may receive restricted stock units on hire, so a new-hire grant is available below the executive layer but is not universal.
• The only public grant values anywhere in the ladder are the GCF 11 example at a CHF 4.5 million annual target, the chief executive at $18.00 million of 2025 stock and option awards, and the non-employee director award at $220,000 a year.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Thousand Oaks

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $444.7 reference price at 25 August 2026 intraday quote and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Thomas Dittrich's employment and expatriate documents are the single most valuable disclosure in this report, because they are the only public Amgen document that names a Global Career Framework level and prices it. GCF 11 carries a CHF 1,070,000 base salary, a 100 percent Global Management Incentive Plan target, a CHF 4,500,000 annual long-term incentive target split CHF 2.25 million performance units, CHF 1.35 million options and CHF 0.90 million restricted stock units, a CHF 4.7 million make-whole restricted stock unit award, a CHF 4.0 million cash inducement, a CHF 5.8 million retention bonus earned over two years, a CHF 250,000 relocation allowance for the United States move and severance protection of two times salary plus target bonus for a qualifying termination within two years. The salary-review timing follows Amgen's regular process without a stated global month.

Board compensation framework

The standard 2026 non-employee director package is $335,000 before any lead-director or committee add-ons, split $115,000 cash and $220,000 equity. Individual director totals for 2025 by name were not captured in any reviewed bundle, so this report shows the programme rather than the outcome.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Two disclosures give partial visibility. The France 2026 collective agreement set a 3 percent base-salary increase budget effective 1 March 2026, allocated according to where an employee sits against market bands, which is strong evidence of a market-positioning philosophy but binding only in France. Separately, the proxy records a 3.5 percent 2026 base increase for non-CEO named executive officers and describes it as consistent with the United States staff population, which is the closest thing to a public United States merit signal.

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 bundles disagree on David Reese's title. One describes him as Executive Vice President, Research and Development and the other as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. The compensation figures are identical in both, so this report uses the research and development title from the narrative report and records the conflict.
2. 2Robert Bradway's 4 March 2026 Form 4 reports 119,782 options exercised in both the transaction table and the derivative table, while its explanatory footnote says 119,872. This report uses 119,782 and preserves the discrepancy rather than silently correcting a filing.
3. 3H1BGrader's exact Amgen Inc. entity reports 133 FY2026 labour condition applications at a $141,006 median, while MyVisaJobs' broader Amgen grouping reports 314 applications and 87 I-129 approvals. Different entity matching and filing definitions make the two impossible to combine, so both are preserved.
4. 4Neither bundle contains a benefit load, so no employer benefit cost has been stripped out of any total here. The United States 401(k) core and match, worth up to 10 percent of eligible pay, is deliberately reported in the benefits section and excluded from every base, bonus, equity and total figure.
5. 5Every bonus and equity component below GCF 11 is modeled. Amgen publishes no bonus-target grid and no employee grant table, so those columns are planning envelopes calibrated on the disclosed executive targets rather than observations. Only the base column on those rows carries evidence.
6. 6GCF 8 and GCF 10 have no direct observation of any kind and are interpolated between their neighbours. Their level numbers are analytical, since Amgen has published no GCF 7 to GCF 10 title crosswalk.
7. 7The Hyderabad calibration is fitted across employee-submitted total-pay observations that are not monotonic: the Associate Director submission reads below the Senior Manager submission and the Director range spans 2.8 million to 10 million rupees. The fitted line smooths that noise rather than treating each sample as a level median.
8. 8Eleven of the twenty-one markets carry no Amgen pay observation at all. Their factors are labour-market models built to keep the footprint table complete, and they are flagged as such in the model rules rather than presented as evidence.
9. 9The Employee Stock Purchase Plan share reserve is disclosed while its discount, offering length and lookback are not, so the plan cannot be valued from public sources at all.
10. 10New Zealand appears as a coverage-only state in one bundle because a page contract asked for it. No current Amgen New Zealand employing office was substantiated, so it is omitted from this report entirely rather than shown with a modelled factor.
11. 11No companywide 2026 salary freeze, salary cut, restructuring or campus offer revision was located in any reviewed source. That is an absence of evidence rather than evidence that no local action occurred.

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

Amgen publishes no prior-year headcount comparison, no attrition percentage and no site-level employee counts, so there is no multi-year workforce trend to plot. The only growth signal anywhere in the corpus is the Hyderabad build-out, which if achieved would represent roughly 6 percent of global staff at a single site inside a year and would materially change the company's cost-of-labour mix.