How APA Corporation Pays

Individual contributor ladder — research tiers T0 through T9

Management ladder — M1 supervisor through M2 director

Executive and board — VP through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• APA Corporation is the Nasdaq-listed holding company created in 2021, and Apache Corporation is the subsidiary that employs the workforce. Third-party salary records filed under Apache are therefore the right records for APA employees.
• The 2024 Callon Petroleum acquisition changed leadership and organisation, but no public filing provides a harmonised pre-merger and post-merger grade map or any evidence of inherited Callon band codes.
• No peer-level crosswalk to Chevron, EOG, Occidental or Devon internal grades is possible, because none of those companies publishes a grade system either. Any such mapping would be speculation.
• The research tiers are strongest for the Houston corporate and subsurface title families that carry the largest Glassdoor samples, and weakest for field, offshore and international roles.
• The non-employee director row is a governance package, not an employment band, and is excluded from the range chart along with the senior vice president and named executive rows.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Houston

APA's 2025 Form 10-K names Houston, Midland, Cairo and Aberdeen as its year-end offices and reports full-time equivalents by country rather than by city, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by headcount. Tulsa, which appeared in the original research brief, is not a listed year-end office and is retained here only as a comparison market.

Houston anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Houston column is the anchor. T0 through T8 come from Glassdoor Apache Houston title estimates with samples of six to fourteen submissions each; T9, M1, M2, VP and SVP are modeled because no Houston observation exists for those tiers.
• The Reservoir Engineer role page is the single most useful record in the whole dataset because it splits a $208,000 total median into a $151,000 base median, a $27,000 bonus median and a $30,000 stock median. That 73 / 13 / 14 split is what sets the base, bonus and equity mix used across the technical tiers.
• Aberdeen is calibrated from ten employer-specific Glassdoor North Sea titles whose midpoints average about $132,000 against a Houston title average of about $140,000. The sample skews towards senior offshore technical roles, so the total factor of 0.94 is flattering to junior Aberdeen roles.
• San Antonio is calibrated from the visa record rather than salary records: four historical certified applications average $103,750 against $126,805 for the four Houston applications, a ratio of 0.82.
• Cairo, Paramaribo, France and the four unverified comparison markets carry no company-specific salary evidence at all. Their factors are planning envelopes only and are recorded in the known gaps rather than presented as observations.
• The executive vice president, president and chief executive rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison. They are global executive values, not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 2016 Plan uses fungible pool accounting: an option or stock appreciation right consumes 1.0 pool share per share awarded, while a full-value award such as a restricted stock unit or performance award consumes 2.39 pool shares. A simple granted-over-authorised utilisation percentage is therefore meaningless for this plan.
• Total remaining capacity across approved and non-approved plans was 5,722,675 shares at 31 December 2025, before the May 2026 amendment added 24,160,000 shares and extended the plan term to 21 May 2036.
• The precise ungranted balance after the May 2026 amendment is not publicly disclosed, because grants, forfeitures and recycling continued after the measurement dates.
• The reintroduction of stock options into the 2025 executive mix changes the pool arithmetic as well as the pay design, because options consume pool capacity at less than half the rate of a full-value award.

Equity plan capacity and grant design

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Time-based restricted stock units generally vest ratably over three years and options generally become exercisable ratably over three years. Performance awards work differently: the 2025 cycle covers 2025 to 2027, is weighted 60 percent relative total shareholder return and 40 percent cash return on invested capital, pays between 0 and 200 percent of target, and settles half after the three-year period with the remaining half a further year later. The 2023 cycle was earned at 120 percent of target, with half vesting in 2026 and the balance scheduled for 2027. Director restricted stock units vest at grant but are mandatorily deferred until board service ends.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The 2026 proxy states that essentially all employees participate in equity-based compensation programmes regardless of business unit. That is the single strongest equity-eligibility statement in this report and it is a genuine differentiator against employers where stock begins only at senior grades.
• Broad eligibility does not mean transparent sizing. Grant values, share counts, refresh cadence and the mix of restricted stock units against performance awards below the named executive layer are all not publicly disclosed, so no employee grant matrix can be constructed.
• The corroborating employee-level evidence is the Glassdoor Apache Reservoir Engineer Houston role page, which reports a $30,000 stock median inside a $208,000 total median. That confirms stock reaches ordinary technical staff even though the grant rule is unpublished.
• The stock ownership requirements are the clearest published hierarchy signal in the whole equity programme: two times base salary at vice president, two and a half at senior vice president, three at executive vice president, four at president and ten at chief executive. Officers must also retain at least 15 percent after tax of shares acquired on restricted stock unit and performance award settlement.
• APA operates no employee stock purchase plan in any reviewed source, so the discounted-purchase mechanism common at technology employers has no equivalent here. The retirement plans carry that role instead.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Houston

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $42.96 reference price at 24 August 2026 completed-session close and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Two figures in the Summary Compensation Table need reading carefully. Kimberly Warnica's cash column includes a $500,000 sign-on bonus subject to clawback conditions on top of her $1,151,818 annual incentive, so her total is not a steady-state Chief Legal Officer package. Stephen Riney and Ben Rodgers each received a discretionary amount in the bonus column, $110,160 and $53,873 respectively, that lifted their formula-determined incentive from the 189.8 percent corporate result to the 200 percent individual cap. Named executive salaries were held flat for the 2025 cycle, so the entire increase in reported pay came from the incentive result and the redesigned long-term incentive mix.

Board compensation framework

A standard non-employee director therefore receives about $300,000 a year, $100,000 in cash and $200,000 in deferred restricted stock units, before any committee chair retainer. The non-executive chair receives about $500,000. Because director units vest at grant and are then deferred for the whole of board service, directors accumulate a share position they cannot monetise until they leave, which is a stronger alignment mechanism than a conventional vesting schedule.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one part of the cycle with real visibility is the executive equity calendar: the 2026 grants for the chief executive and Mark Maddox were both dated 6 January 2026, suggesting an early-January annual grant date for officers. Nothing equivalent is published for the general employee population, and no companywide salary hike percentage for 2025 or 2026 was found in any reviewed source.

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 Reservoir Engineer tier has two conflicting public figures in the same source family: the Glassdoor Apache Houston title table shows a $223,500 midpoint while the dedicated role page shows a $208,000 total median. This report uses $208,000 because the role page is the only record that splits base, bonus and stock, and it names its sample of seventeen submissions.
2. 2Cairo, Paramaribo, France, Tulsa, Bangalore, Sydney, Auckland and Singapore carry no company-specific salary evidence at all. Their calibration factors are planning envelopes chosen to keep the location selector usable and must not be read as observations of APA pay in those markets.
3. 3The Aberdeen factors are drawn from ten Glassdoor North Sea titles with samples of one to three submissions each, several of which the source itself labels low confidence, and one of which dates to October 2023. The market is directionally evidenced but not reliably calibrated.
4. 4The vice president and senior vice president rows have no compensation disclosure of any kind. They are modeled between the director tier and the named executive averages using the ownership multiples as the only anchor, and they are the least reliable rows in the band table.
5. 5The executive vice president row averages three people whose packages differ substantially, and Warnica's $500,000 sign-on bonus is inside that average, so it overstates a steady-state executive vice president package by roughly $167,000 of cash.
6. 6The share price of $42.96 is a completed-session reference close from 24 August 2026. The bundle notes that a localised data page returned a conflicting figure, so this value is used only for illustrative share-value math and not as a valuation assertion.
7. 7The bundle's foreign-exchange snapshot covers only the United States dollar, sterling, the Egyptian pound, the rupee and the Australian dollar. The euro, New Zealand dollar and Singapore dollar rates used for France, Auckland and Singapore are same-date reference rates from outside the bundle.
8. 8APA reports revenue by segment in its filings but the bundle records only total 2025 revenue of about $8.92 billion and production revenue of about $7.229 billion, so no geographic revenue split is presented in this report.
9. 9No companywide salary hike percentage, pay freeze, salary cut or off-cycle correction for 2025 or 2026 was located in any reviewed source, and no employee-level payout percentage against target exists for any year.

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

APA reports full-time equivalents by country rather than by city, so the geographic signal stops at national level. Suriname carries active development, exploration and appraisal work with zero direct full-time equivalents reported, which means that project is delivered through partners, contractors and assignees rather than through a local payroll. The 2025 contraction is the single most important context for every salary observation in this report, because most public submissions predate it.