How Arista Networks Pays

Technical / individual-contributor track

Management / leadership track

Corporate-officer layer above M4

Hierarchy qualifications

• Arista’s public salary pages and employee submissions commonly use engineering labels such as L2, 3L, 3H, 4L, 4H and 5L. Arista’s filings do not publish a company-wide mapping of those labels to corporate grades, so the catalogue is an inferred career architecture built from reported levels, official job titles, H-1B titles and executive ranks — suitable for benchmarking, not for determining an employee’s internal HR grade.
• No filing or public compensation source reviewed describes a formal legacy-band structure or a post-merger harmonization program. Arista has made acquisitions, but any acquired-company title or pay integration is not publicly disclosed; public data support a single benchmarking architecture rather than separate inherited band systems.
• The peer mapping below is a market-equivalence guide, not an official cross-company leveling table.

Approximate peer-level mapping

Verified footprint and data availability

Cross-market median total compensation (USD)

Median points used by the model, converted at 26 August 2026 planning FX. Nominal total-compensation comparisons, not purchasing-power parity or cost-to-company; a modeled value is not an official Arista band rate. Burnaby and Dublin appear in the multipliers below and in the location tables.

Equivalent-level location multipliers — Santa Clara median ÷ local median

Ratios are sensitive to stock-value snapshots, level matching and the limited observation count in smaller markets — useful for workforce-cost planning and offer normalization, not for asserting internal transfer ratios.

Source-grounded employee compensation anchors

Filed 2025 executive bonus design — two equally weighted corporate measures

The 2025 Employee Incentive Plan provided one annual payout after year-end. The committee also considered market diversification, product quality, innovation, support and individual performance. Overachievement could fund the pool above 100%, with negative discretion for margin, quality, non-cloud growth or customer-growth concerns.

Actual 2025 named-executive payouts

Three-year CEO incentive history

CEO base salary was $300k in each year. The changing total is principally grant-date stock-award timing, not a change in fixed salary; the CEO’s base has remained $300,000 for more than a decade.

The proxy’s equity-compensation-plan table reports 28,856,602 securities outstanding and 149,141,940 shares available for future issuance, the latter combining the Restated Plan and ESPP. A clean pool-utilization rate is not directly reconstructable because the Restated Plan includes recycled shares from prior awards and the ESPP has a separate reserve mechanism.

Pool utilization and burn diagnostics — 2025

Vesting mechanics — disclosed executive cadence

The broad plan allows multiple award structures; no single employee-wide schedule is disclosed. Executive award footnotes show a common 6.25% quarterly cadence — 25% per year over four years — while performance awards add a performance condition before service vesting. The schedule is an illustration of the disclosed executive cadence, not a promise for every employee.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The Restated Plan is broad enough to cover employees at all levels. Reported L2 packages include stock, so equity is not demonstrably restricted to senior grades.
• Arista does not disclose a minimum eligibility band, grant-value matrix, universal refresh cadence or country-specific award policy.
• The Compensation Committee has delegated authority to the CEO to grant equity to employees with corporate rank SVP or below, excluding Section 16 officers and executive direct reports, subject to the delegation’s conditions; awards become effective on the tenth business day specified in the policy.
• Executive grant decisions consider role, performance, retention, peer data and existing holdings; the CEO receives PRSUs in the disclosed program, while other NEOs receive a mix of RSUs and PRSUs.

Market-derived four-year grant equivalents — Bangalore

Estimates convert the annual stock component implied by reported base, bonus and total compensation into a four-year grant-equivalent. They are useful for offer comparison but are not Arista grant guidelines. Share equivalents use the $189.48 ANET quote of 25 August 2026 and ignore plan valuation rules and PRSU performance.

Recent disclosed grant activity

RSUs and ESPP participation can be offered only where local legal, tax, securities and payroll arrangements permit. The filings do not disclose country-by-country participation rates, withholding methods or tax equalization, so India, Australia, Canada, Ireland, UK, Singapore and Japan equity administration details are not publicly disclosed.

Kenneth Duda also received a $1,000 cash bonus included in his filed total; the table places the remaining amount in the displayed categories. Nightingale’s $52.0M stock-award value was dominated by a one-time new-hire package and should not be treated as recurring annual compensation.

Non-employee director compensation — 2025

The 2025 cash structure included a $75,000 board retainer, a $120,000 lead-independent-director retainer, committee-chair retainers of $30,000 for Audit, $25,000 for Compensation and $12,000 for Nominating/Governance, plus committee-member retainers. The annual equity policy was revised to a $250,000 intended value, although 2025 grant-date values were roughly $336,500 because of timing and stock-price movement.

Filed executive cycle

Employee rating system — not publicly disclosed

Anonymous employee discussions describe uneven raise experiences, occasional absence of annual hikes and reliance on equity for retention. Those comments are useful sentiment signals but cannot establish a global policy or payout rate [M13].

Career-progression planning model

Promotion increase: not publicly disclosed for every transition. Timings are an inferred career architecture, not Arista band progression data. Because stock can outweigh cash at senior levels, an employee’s annual total compensation can change substantially without a base-salary increase. Promotions may affect title, scope and future equity opportunity even when the immediate cash increase is modest. That is an inference from reported packages and the company’s equity-heavy executive philosophy, not a disclosed promotion policy.

FY2024–FY2026 sponsor statistics

Worksite salary distributions — WARNTracker subset

Cumulative worksite filing volumes — MyVisaJobs

Salary percentiles were not displayed for every city in the retrieved view, so they remain NPD rather than being inferred from averages.

Job-title mix — cumulative filings and recent-subset medians

Evidence classes used in this report

Data-quality and conflict log

Not-publicly-disclosed inventory

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, planning rates as of 2026-08-26

Rates are rounded planning rates for comparability, not payroll or tax conversion. Compensation intelligence, not an offer, tax, immigration, accounting or legal opinion.

Source register — 41 sources

Arista added 1,503 full-time employees from 2022 to 2025, a compound annual growth rate of approximately 12.3%. The company does not publish quarterly headcount, city-level headcount, an employee-wide voluntary-attrition rate or an “IT services attrition” measure; as a networking product company, an IT-services attrition comparator would be conceptually weak [P2].

Items specifically investigated but not publicly established