How Applied Materials Pays

Professional and technical ladder — T1 through E9

Executive ladder — V1 through V4

Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The incentive-plan exhibit lists B4 to B7, E4 to E9, M4 to M7 and V1 to V4 as participant grades, with committee discretion to include selected employees outside those ranges. It does not publish B1 to B3, E1 to E3 or M1 to M3 titles.
• Job postings are the second source of truth. They confirm Mechanical Engineer II at E2, Process Engineer IV at E4, System Engineer V at E5, Module Process Engineer Director at E6, Technology Collaboration Senior Director VII at E7, and Manager III, Manager IV, Senior Manager, Director and Senior Director on the M ladder.
• Do not read E5 as Principal Engineer in every job family, and do not mechanically assign Directors and Vice Presidents to M6 or M7. Applied Materials has never published that mapping.
• V1 to V4 are disclosed incentive-plan grades but the title-to-grade map inside them is not published, so the V2 and V3 rows here are calibrated from named-executive disclosures rather than quoted from a grade chart.
• Applied Materials has acquired businesses including Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates, but no public source documents a surviving separate legacy grade table or a grade-harmonisation schedule, so this report uses one ladder.
• 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 Santa Clara

Applied Materials does not disclose city-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by employee count. Santa Clara is the headquarters and Bengaluru is identified as a major engineering and research centre. Sydney, London, Auckland and Dubai are carried as requested market comparators where no significant Applied Materials employee population was established from public evidence.

Santa Clara anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Santa Clara column is the anchor. E2, E3 and E5 come straight from official Applied Materials job-posting ranges; E1, E4, E6, E7 and E8 are Levels.fyi and Glassdoor triangulations against those posting anchors.
• The strongest single official data point is the Santa Clara Senior Manager M5 range of $171,500 to $236,000. The same code posts at $156,000 to $214,500 in Gloucester, which is where the 0.82 United States city factor comes from.
• United States geography moves pay materially at a constant grade. An E3 New Product Manufacturing Engineer III posts at $96,000 to $132,000 in Austin against $110,500 to $152,000 in Santa Clara.
• India is the only market in this report whose gap to Santa Clara is level-dependent. Total compensation runs at about 10 percent of the anchor at T1 and rises towards 40 percent at V1, because senior Indian packages carry far more equity.
• The V2, V3 and V4 rows are proxy disclosures shown for comparison only. Outside the United States they are scaled by the local factor and converted to local currency, which makes them neither the disclosed United States figure nor evidence of a local country-head package.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Comparing the 62,280,998 shares authorised by the 2021 amendment with the 15 million available at 26 July 2026 implies about 75.9 percent gross reserve depletion and 24.1 percent remaining. That is an analytical comparison, not an official utilisation rate: award counting rules, forfeitures, cancellations and later share adjustments all affect the relationship.
• Unrecognised share-based compensation was $947 million at the FY2025 close and $1.2 billion at 26 July 2026 with a 2.7 year weighted-average recognition period.
• At the 25 August 2026 spot price the remaining incentive-plan reserve carries a gross notional value of about $7.17 billion and the purchase-plan reserve about $3.35 billion. Those are illustrations only and are neither accounting expense nor budgeted payroll.
• Nonvested awards at the FY2025 close were about 9 million shares with an aggregate intrinsic value near $2.086 billion, and up to 0.7 million additional performance shares could still be earned.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Employee and executive schedules differ, and the difference is disclosed. The India rewards summary says stock awards for recipients are generally restricted stock units vesting over four years, which is the schedule shown here. Named-executive restricted stock units in the proxy vest ratably over three years instead, and executive performance shares are a single three-year cliff on committee certification. The plan document itself only sets floors: at least three years for service-only awards and at least one year for performance awards, subject to exceptions.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• There is a real difference between stock-purchase access and company-funded stock awards. The purchase plan is designed for substantially all employees; recurring restricted stock unit grants are not publicly shown to begin at any single universal grade.
• No filing identifies a minimum grade at which restricted stock units start, and no plan table publishes grant values by grade. The strongest evidence of routine award participation begins in the senior professional, manager and executive populations.
• Modelled annual grant values run from no evidenced recurring grant at T1, through $5,000 to $25,000 at E2, $25,000 to $100,000 at E4, $100,000 to $500,000 at E6, $400,000 to $1.5 million at E8 and $1 million to $5 million at V1. These are analytical recruitment and retention estimates, not policy.
• Performance share units are evidenced only for senior management and executives. Below that layer, awards observed in public data are restricted stock units, and their frequency is a mix of new-hire, selective and retention grants rather than a guaranteed annual refresh.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Santa Clara

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $477.97 reference price at 25 August 2026 market snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Applied Materials reviews executive base salaries annually against responsibility, performance, time in role, experience and market data, and in FY2025 that review produced no increase for anyone other than Deane. The chief executive's salary has been $1,030,000 since December 2018, so the entire growth in his reported pay from $26.855 million in FY2023 to $27.799 million in FY2024 and $29.649 million in FY2025 came from equity and incentive design rather than from salary. Beginning with FY2025 grants, half of the executive performance share metric moved from non-GAAP operating margin to non-GAAP economic profit, with relative total shareholder return remaining the other half.

Board compensation framework

A non-employee director with no committee role therefore sits at about $340,000 a year, of which $240,000 is stock. Committee membership, a committee chair role or the board chair retainer add to that. Directors receive restricted stock units rather than options, consistent with the absence of options anywhere in the current programme.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one firm calendar mechanic in the public record is a payment rule rather than a review rule: the Applied Incentive Plan ordinarily pays cash awards during the fiscal quarter following fiscal year-end. Executive base salaries are formally reviewed once a year against responsibility, performance, time in role, experience and market data, and country rewards documents say salary is reviewed periodically or annually in some markets. None of that establishes a global employee hike month or percentage.

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 bundles use different foreign-exchange snapshots for the same 25 August 2026 date, for example 95.7203 against 95.3594 rupees to the dollar. This report standardises on the larger bundle's snapshot, which covers every currency used here.
2. 2Equity pool figures differ because they are from different filing dates, not because the sources conflict: 17 million incentive-plan shares and 8 million purchase-plan shares available at the FY2025 close on 26 October 2025, against 15 million and 7 million at 26 July 2026. Unrecognised share compensation moved from $947 million to $1.2 billion over the same window.
3. 3The bundles disagree on the purchase-plan cycle months. One reports offering periods beginning in March and September, the other reports February and August from the India rewards document. Both describe the same six-month, 15 percent discount architecture, and neither month pair could be confirmed against the plan text.
4. 4FY2025 executive bonus attainment is quoted two ways. The chief executive was paid 97.5 percent of his target, while the average across all five named executives was 95.1 percent with individual outcomes from 88.1 to 97.5 percent. Both are correct; they answer different questions.
5. 5The share-price snapshot of $477.97 on 25 August 2026 cannot be reconciled with June 2026 Form 4 sale prices between $498.86 and $736.05 in the same bundle. The snapshot is used only for the clearly labelled notional pool illustrations, and the Form 4 prices are reported exactly as filed.
6. 6The Santa Clara T1 row is the one band where the bundle's total does not reconcile to its components. Its $62,000 total exceeds base plus the modelled 3 percent target by about $4,300, and because no recurring equity grant is evidenced at that level the residual is carried as other pay rather than converted into a grant.
7. 7India is the only market with a level-dependent factor, and the underlying ratio curve is convex while the interpolation is linear in seniority. The fitted line therefore reads a little high through the middle of the Indian ladder and a little low at V1.
8. 8The V2 and V3 rows are cohort models calibrated to the FY2025 named-executive disclosures, not published ranges, and the bundle itself labels V3 as modelled rather than triangulated. The source bundle shows those rows unscaled outside the United States; this report applies the same city factor to them as to every other band, so a non-United States executive cell is neither the filed figure nor a local package and should be read only in the Santa Clara column.
9. 9Sydney, London, Auckland and Dubai are carried as requested market comparators. No significant Applied Materials employee population or country-specific benefit schedule was established for any of them in either bundle, and their rows should be read as market context rather than as company pay.
10. 10No companywide FY2025 or FY2026 salary-hike percentage, pay freeze, campus-offer revision or delayed-joining programme was located in any source, and none should be inferred from generic market articles.
11. 11No notional employer benefit load is added to any total in this report. Provident Fund, superannuation, Central Provident Fund and pension contributions are employer cost and appear only in the benefits section.

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 workforce has grown by about 7 percent over three fiscal years while the Asia Pacific share has climbed steadily from 44 to 46 percent. Applied Materials does not disclose city-level headcount or any attrition rate, so the 4 percent restructuring figure is the only workforce-reduction number in the public record and must not be read as attrition. The rounded regional percentages imply roughly 16,790 Asia Pacific, 15,330 North America and 4,380 Europe and Middle East employees at FY2025 year-end.

Q3 FY2026 revenue by region

Roughly 80 percent of revenue comes from Asia, which is why the customer-facing footprint in Hsinchu, Tainan, Xi'an, Shanghai, Hwaseong, Tokyo and Kobe matters more to this company than a conventional sales-office map would suggest. Revenue mix is not the same as employee mix: Asia Pacific held 46 percent of the workforce at FY2025 year-end.