How Anthropic Pays

Programme ladder — fixed-term Fellows cohort

Professional ladder — P1 through P4

Technical ladder — T1 through T5

Sales ladder — quoted as On Target Earnings

Management ladder — M1 through M2

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Anthropic's chief executive has publicly described a series of levels, assignment of candidates to a level and a principle of not negotiating that assigned level case by case in the interest of internal fairness. That confirms a level architecture exists; it does not reveal the codes.
• Current postings repeatedly say that required years of experience will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position, which is why this report records role requirements rather than promotion clocks.
• Member of Technical Staff is the title that appears most often in immigration filings and is deliberately broad. Visa records show it spanning from $133,952 to $1,380,000 of base salary, so treating it as one level would destroy all resolution.
• The Levels.fyi labels Software Engineer, Senior, Lead and Staff are platform-defined. They are used here because they are the only source that splits a package into base, stock and bonus, not because Anthropic has confirmed them.
• No merger-derived or predecessor band system was identified. Anthropic was built as a standalone company, so there is no legacy grade map to reconcile.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus San Francisco

Anthropic has verified offices in Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Zurich, Paris, Munich and Milan, and a verified India office in Bengaluru. Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore are deliberately excluded from the pay table because no Anthropic salary range has been published in Australian dollars, yen, won or Singapore dollars, and converting a United States range into those currencies would invent a local band. Auckland and Dubai appear in one bundle only as regional coverage placeholders with no office located, and are excluded here for the same reason.

San Francisco anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The San Francisco column is the anchor. Technical rows come from Levels.fyi United States records, which do not distinguish between United States cities, and every professional, sales and management row is the midpoint of an official Anthropic posting that applies across the listed United States cities.
• London is the only market with a deep posted record outside the United States. Sampled ranges run £130,000 to £165,000 for a Business Systems Analyst, £190,000 to £240,000 for a Product Manager, £260,000 to £370,000 for Alignment research, £325,000 to £485,000 for a Staff Software Engineer and £260,000 to £630,000 for Pretraining Scaling research.
• Converted at the 25 August 2026 rate, the London Alignment and Pretraining ranges land within about 1 percent of their United States twins while the London Product Manager range sits about 15 percent below, which is why London carries separate junior and senior factors rather than one multiplier.
• Dublin is calibrated from four euro postings: Senior Software Engineer, Inference and Staff Software Engineer, AI Reliability at €235,000 to €295,000, Applied AI Architect at €190,000 to €215,000 and Commercial Counsel, EMEA at €165,000 to €210,000. The same euro range covering both Senior and Staff scope is what produces the falling base factor up the ladder.
• Bengaluru is calibrated only from two account-executive postings at ₹12,499,200 to ₹16,272,000 and ₹16,272,000 to ₹20,198,400 of base salary. That is roughly 0.55 of the United States sales anchor, and it is a go-to-market observation, not a technical one, so the factor is carried flat rather than interpolated up the ladder.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

• A private financing valuation is not a share price. The $965 billion post-money figure from the May 2026 Series H prices a preferred round; it does not establish the fair market value of common stock, an option strike price or a tender price.
• Valuing a grant would require, at minimum, the number of underlying units, the security class and conversion rights, the fully diluted share count, the preferred liquidation preferences, the strike or purchase price, the vesting and post-termination exercise terms, the transfer and tender restrictions and a current common-share fair market value. None of those is public.
• Levels.fyi offer submissions describe a 2025 senior offer at roughly $1.0 million of total grant and about $250,000 of annualized value, structured as option value in year one and RSU value later, and an older 2024 offer at roughly $960,000 of option grant value with a reported strike price. Those are individual unaudited submissions, useful for structure and useless as a policy.
• Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on 1 June 2026. If and when a public S-1 appears, stock-plan exhibits, option overhang, RSU obligations, executive equity and dilution may finally become disclosable, and this section should be rebuilt from that filing.

Valuation, liquidity and grant-economics evidence

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The four-year, one-year-cliff-then-monthly pattern above is what Levels.fyi reports across Anthropic submissions. It is the single most commonly repeated equity fact about the company and it has never been confirmed by Anthropic. Individual offers can and do differ, particularly across instruments, countries and hire dates, and the mix of options and RSUs within one package appears to have changed over time in the self-reported offer record.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Anthropic states that full-time compensation includes competitive salary and equity, and every non-sales posting reviewed describes equity as part of the package. That establishes breadth but not a minimum eligible level.
• There is no published grant table by level, no refresh cadence, no eligibility threshold and no country matrix. The band-by-band equity policy in both research bundles is a column of Not publicly disclosed entries, deliberately, because any precise grant-size range would be an invention.
• Employee-reported annualized stock values give the only observable curve: about $117,000 at the entry software-engineer label, $263,000 at Senior, $434,000 at Lead and $843,000 at Staff. Those are aggregates from a self-selected sample and cannot be multiplied by four to infer a contractual grant.
• India postings are the exception in the other direction: the Bengaluru account-executive listings explicitly say the package includes equity, which confirms that equity travels to the India entity even though no rupee grant value has ever been published.
• No performance share unit programme and no stock appreciation right programme was identified in either research bundle.

Indicative annual grant value by band — San Francisco

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Publicly identified senior leadership includes Dario Amodei as Chief Executive Officer, Daniela Amodei as President, Krishna Rao as Chief Financial Officer and Mike Krieger as Chief Product Officer, alongside regional leadership such as the general manager for Australia and New Zealand appointed with the Sydney office. A current standard Executive Vice President layer was not located in the reviewed role catalogue, so the assumption that Vice President is below Senior Vice President is below Executive Vice President should not be applied to Anthropic. Compensation for every one of these roles is not publicly disclosed, and the confidential draft S-1 announced on 1 June 2026 is a submission to the Securities and Exchange Commission rather than a public filing, so it published no tables.

Board compensation framework

Anthropic is a Delaware public benefit corporation rather than a listed issuer, so it files no annual report on director compensation and no say-on-pay proposal. Everything above that is not a name is unavailable, and the absence is a disclosure-regime fact rather than evidence that no arrangement exists.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What can be inferred safely is narrow. Postings tie required years to the internal job level, which confirms structured levelling. Anthropic supports a very highly paid technical individual contributor track, so becoming a manager is not a precondition for top compensation, and the two sampled manager postings show that function moves the cash range more than the layer does. Because the company is scaling fast and has a confidential registration statement on file, equity refresh, liquidity and retention design are likely to matter more to an individual's outcome than any annual salary review, and none of that mechanism is public.

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 headcount. One cites a San Francisco Chronicle report of more than 2,500 employees in early 2026 and a Revelio Labs estimate of about 4,020 in March 2026; the other cites The Information at about 3,000 in May 2026 and Revelio at about 3,830 in March 2026. This report uses about 3,000 as the headline because it is the most recent named-publisher estimate, and keeps the others visible rather than averaging them.
2. 2The two bundles use slightly different foreign-exchange snapshots for the same 25 August 2026 date, for example 95.4176 against 95.3594 rupees per dollar and 0.733579 against 0.733115 pounds. This report standardises on the European Central Bank derived set from the larger bundle, which covers every currency used here.
3. 3The bundles disagree on the Levels.fyi Lead Software Engineer total, at $779,000 against $777,000, and on the Staff total, quoted as both $1,248,333 and $1.25 million. This report uses the component stack of $341,000 base, $434,000 stock and about $1,700 bonus, which sums to $776,700, and $405,000 plus $843,000 for Staff.
4. 4The two bundles disagree on the London Staff Software Engineer range. One samples only research and product roles, the other adds a Staff Software Engineer, Node Infrastructure posting at £325,000 to £485,000. The London factors here use both, which is why the London base factor is above 1 at every level.
5. 5Levels.fyi's own page carries two different United States software-engineer medians, an overall $402,350 company median and a roughly $722,000 software-engineer median in its frequently-asked-questions panel. Both are live crowdsourced statistics that move as submissions change, and this report uses the lower company-wide figure for the pay-ratio denominator note.
6. 6Rows built from posted salary ranges are cash only, because Anthropic confirms equity exists for those clusters but publishes no grant size. Rows built from Levels.fyi are base plus stock. The two therefore are not measuring the same thing, and the Staff+ row in particular reads below the Staff row because the Staff+ evidence is a posted salary with no grant attached.
7. 7No notional employer benefit load is included anywhere in this report. The $500 a month wellness stipend, the education stipend, the home-office stipend and the meals are employer costs and benefits, not pay, and every total reconciles to base plus incentive plus annualized equity.
8. 8Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Mumbai beyond the Bengaluru carry-across, Auckland and Dubai are named in the bundles as offices, hiring markets or coverage placeholders but carry no published salary range. Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore are excluded from the pay table rather than being given a converted United States factor, so the report understates Anthropic's geographic footprint in order not to overstate its pay evidence.
9. 9The Bengaluru factor rests on two go-to-market postings and no technical posting, so it is carried flat up the ladder instead of being interpolated. Whether Anthropic's India technical pay compresses against San Francisco the way most Indian technology pay does is genuinely unknown.
10. 10No company-wide salary-hike percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, layoff programme, campus offer revision or delayed-joining event was located for 2024 to 2026. The absence of a result is not proof that nothing happened.

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 — 14 sources

There is no audited headcount and no annual attrition rate. Three sources using three methods produce three answers for roughly the same period, and this report keeps them apart rather than reconciling them into a false single number. The only retention evidence is a SignalFire-derived finding, reported by TechRepublic, that 80 percent of the 2021 to early-2023 hire cohort was still at Anthropic two years later, which is cohort retention and not one minus annual attrition. Reuters reported in September 2025 that Anthropic planned to triple its international workforce, so the geographic mix is changing faster than the total.