How Ares Management Pays

Analyst ladder — B0 through B4

Senior professional ladder — B5 through B8

Executive and board — B9 through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• No public Ares source located in either research bundle discloses a Band 1 to N, Grade A to Z or equivalent enterprise-wide internal grade code, so the B0 to B10 labels are an external normalisation layer and not an Ares human-resources structure.
• Ares is not organised as a software-engineering individual-contributor and manager ladder. Corporate technology roles frequently carry finance-style seniority labels such as AVP, VP and MD rather than staff or principal engineer titles.
• The mapping is most reliable in investment, fund accounting and operations, where employer postings disclose salary ranges, and least reliable in technology, legal and marketing, where Ares can place equivalent scope differently.
• The 2020 SSG Capital, 2021 Landmark and Black Creek and 2025 GCP International acquisitions each brought inherited title conventions and legacy carry economics. No public evidence of a formal post-acquisition grade harmonisation grid was found in either bundle.
• Vice President, Principal, Managing Director and Partner are public designations rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers rather than claiming a numeric band behind them.
• The independent director row is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart, as are the B9 and B10 proxy cohorts.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Los Angeles

The two bundles disagree on the office count, at more than 55 in one and more than 60 in the other, and disagree on whether Toronto, Abu Dhabi and New Zealand host dedicated Ares offices. This report keeps all three markets but flags them as coverage rather than verified offices.

Los Angeles anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Los Angeles column is the anchor. B1 through B7 medians are built from employer-provided salary ranges on current Ares postings, cross-checked against aggregated total-pay samples and labour condition application wages.
• New York is the strongest public sample and sits about 5 percent above Los Angeles across the ladder, which is why several anchor rows are triangulated from New York postings and then discounted back to the headquarters city.
• Mumbai total compensation runs at roughly 8 percent of the Los Angeles anchor at intern level and rises towards 44 percent at managing director, because senior Indian packages carry a much larger bonus component and because the roles themselves change from support to investment work.
• The B9 and B10 rows are proxy disclosures shown for comparison only. They are global executive values, not a local pay range in any selected city, and the bundle's own appendix says so explicitly.
• Ares publishes no office-level headcount, so no city in this report can be ranked by employee count. Mumbai is identified as a two-site recruiting centre and Los Angeles, New York and London as the clearest enterprise hubs.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 2023 Plan uses an evergreen formula that resets capacity to 15 percent of the combined Class A and Ares Operating Group unit base net of shares already available, so a lifetime utilisation percentage is not a meaningful measure for this plan.
• Reported availability fell 5,066,413 shares between 1 January and 30 June 2026, which is 10.0 percent of the reset reserve. That decline is not the same as gross grants because vesting, forfeiture and recycling all move the reserve.
• Ares granted 4,928,284 restricted units in the first half of 2026 at a weighted-average grant-date fair value of $152.99, while 5,851,767 vested and 78,648 were forfeited, leaving 18,758,475 unvested at 30 June 2026.
• FY2025 activity was 7,455,032 units granted, 5,393,967 vested and 269,399 forfeited, ending the year with 19,760,606 unvested units.
• Equity compensation expense was $740.549 million for FY2025 and $386.411 million for the first half of 2026. Both are accounting measures, not cash paid, and neither tells an employee what a grant is worth on vesting day.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Executive restricted units commonly vest in four equal annual instalments. Arougheti's and deVeer's January 2025 awards vest 25 percent a year from 30 June 2026 through 2029, and Jacobson's vest annually from 31 January 2027 through 2030. Deferred bonus units use three equal annual instalments instead, and independent director grants vest in full after one year. Filings describe service periods of up to five years, so the four-year pattern above is the common case rather than a universal rule. Carried interest follows fund-specific schedules and is monetised only when investment performance and realisation conditions are met.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• No firmwide equity eligibility threshold, standard grant table or minimum eligible band is published for any level below the named executive officers. Both bundles record this as not publicly disclosed rather than estimating it.
• Restricted units, not options, are the instrument. The plan permits options but Ares says it does not currently grant new options, stock appreciation rights or similar instruments, so an Ares offer letter should not be read through an option-grant mental model.
• Grant sizes below the executive layer are modeled from seniority and current plan behaviour, running from no routine grant at intern level, through a modeled 100 to 700 units at senior associate and 2,500 to 25,000 units at managing director, to the disclosed 170,000 to 250,000 units at the top of the house in 2025.
• Carried interest is the more consequential instrument above vice president, and it is allocated by role and fund rather than by title. Two managing directors with the same title can have entirely different carry economics, and neither figure is ever public.
• Dividend equivalents are generally paid on outstanding restricted units, which adds real economic value before the units vest and is a meaningful difference from a plain technology-company restricted stock unit.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Los Angeles

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $142.41 reference price at 25 August 2026 last trade and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The two structurally unusual facts in this table are worth stating plainly. First, Arougheti and deVeer both reported zero salary and zero cash bonus for FY2025, so their entire reported compensation is a restricted-unit grant plus fund distributions. Second, deVeer out-earned the chief executive by $3.65 million on the reported total because his incentive-fee distributions were larger, which is a direct consequence of fund realisations rather than of any pay decision. Phillips and Sagati Aghili are the only two named executives on a conventional salary-plus-bonus structure, and even there 37 percent of the FY2025 bonus was deferred into January 2026 restricted units.

Board compensation framework

Disclosed 2025 director totals were $476,393 for Michael Lynton, $416,393 each for Judy Olian, Jim Bush and William Joubert, and $376,393 each for Richard Naughton and Ashish Bhutani. Executive Chairman Antony Ressler received no separate director compensation. No stock options were granted to directors.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one visible rhythm is the grant calendar rather than a review calendar. Senior restricted-unit awards were made on 20 and 31 January 2025 and again on 31 January 2026, and the deferred portion of the FY2025 annual bonus was granted as units in January 2026. That pattern indicates year-end performance decisions crystallising in January for at least the senior population. It is an inference from grant dates, not a published all-employee calendar, and it says nothing about when an analyst in Mumbai or an associate in New York learns a number.

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 FX snapshots, 25 August 2026 and 26 August 2026. This report standardises on the 26 August 2026 snapshot because it covers all twelve currencies used here; the differences are under half a percent on every pair.
2. 2The bundles disagree on FY2025 headcount. One reports 3,967 full-time equivalents for 2025 against 2,971 for 2024, the other uses a 3,776 year-end 2025 comparison base to derive the 15 percent growth to 4,343 at 30 June 2026. This report shows 3,967 in the trend and records both figures here.
3. 3The bundles disagree on the office count, at more than 55 in one and more than 60 in the other, and on total people, at approximately 4,400 against 4,430 or more. The 4,343 full-time equivalent figure from the Q2 2026 Form 10-Q is the only one traceable to a filing and is used as the headline.
4. 4The bundles disagree on whether Toronto, Abu Dhabi and New Zealand host dedicated Ares offices. One treats them as offices, the other says dedicated-office evidence was not verified and only Australia-to-New Zealand regional coverage is confirmed. All three are retained here with the presence field marked as coverage rather than a verified office.
5. 5The Mumbai relationship against the Los Angeles anchor is convex rather than linear: the bundle's own city table puts Mumbai at roughly 9 percent of anchor base at intern level, 15 percent at associate, 31 percent at vice president and 63 to 78 percent at managing director and partner. The seniority interpolation used here is linear, so it overstates the mid-ladder bands by up to a third and understates the managing director and partner rows. The bundle's own single 0.26 multiplier would have been worse in both directions.
6. 6The two bundles searched different H-1B sponsoring entities. One found 44 FY2025 records for Ares Operations LLC at a $124,900 median; the other found zero filings for Ares Management LLC and 8 records for Ares Capital Management LLC across FY2023 to FY2025. Both views are shown separately because merging them would double-count and misattribute.
7. 7PlainVisa labels $116,051 as a median for the Ares Capital Management sample, but that value is the arithmetic mean of its displayed rows. The recomputed median of $122,500 is used here and the discrepancy is recorded rather than silently corrected.
8. 8The independent director row splits a disclosed $416,393 total into a blended $325,000 retainer and a $91,393 residual. Ares does not publish the split between committee retainers and the grant-date value of the 1,166-unit award, so the residual mixes the two.
9. 9Ares discloses no geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so no regional revenue panel is shown.
10. 10No companywide salary hike percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, campus offer revision or delayed joining programme was located for 2025 or 2026 in either bundle, and no attrition rate exists in any Ares disclosure.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-26

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

Headcount has grown about 46 percent in eighteen months and the growth is inorganic. GCP International brought people, integration expense and legacy compensation arrangements at once, which is why per-employee compensation averages across periods move for reasons that have nothing to do with pay decisions. Ares publishes no city-level headcount, so the only geographic signal available is the office list itself.