How Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Pays

Normalized professional ladder — B1 through B9

Executive and board — proxy disclosures

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• No public Gallagher filing or careers source exposes a universal Band 1 to N or Grade A to Z code spanning the global enterprise. Titles recur, but acquired brokerages and regional businesses keep different title vocabularies.
• Gallagher is acquisition-led. The 2025 Form 10-K highlights Woodruff Sawyer and AssuredPartners, and the proxy describes AssuredPartners as the largest acquisition in company history, so identical titles can carry very different scope and book responsibility.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for India operations roles and for United Kingdom and Australian broking titles, where employee-submitted samples are dense, and least reliable for senior regional leadership outside the United States.
• Assistant vice president and vice president usage varies by acquired entity and geography, which is why the peer mapping confidence at B7 and B8 is recorded as low to medium rather than medium.
• The non-management director row is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart, as are both proxy executive rows.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Chicago

Gallagher publishes no city-level headcount anywhere. The only geographic disclosures in the filings are the United States and non-United States workforce split, the identification of India Centers of Excellence for corporate employees, and the small per-country populations named in the proxy's pay-ratio exclusion list, which include 177 employees in Singapore and 91 in the United Arab Emirates.

Chicago anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Chicago column is the anchor at 1.00. Rolling Meadows is the registered headquarters but calibrates at 0.95, and New York at 1.22 and Boston at 1.15 are the highest-cost United States markets in the catalogue.
• India is the sharpest compression in the dataset. Bengaluru total compensation runs at roughly 4.8 percent of the Chicago anchor at B1 and rises to about 23.4 percent at B9, so the multiplier falls from more than twenty times at entry level to under five times at senior officer level.
• Australia is the only market that sits level with the Chicago anchor at junior bands. Melbourne calibrates at essentially 1.00 at B1 and falls to about 0.57 at B9, the opposite direction to India.
• Bengaluru anchors the India ladder on employee-submitted records for process associate at 179,000 to 260,000 rupees, process analyst at 228,000 to 319,000, senior process analyst at 348,000 to 500,000, team manager at 550,000 to 680,000 and senior team manager at 900,000 to 1,000,000 rupees.
• The named executive officer and chief executive rows are proxy disclosures for global roles. They are shown for comparison only and are not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• At 31 December 2025 shareholder-approved plans carried 9,374,244 securities linked to outstanding options and unvested units, against 14,627,031 shares remaining for future issuance. Simple utilisation is therefore 39.1 percent used and 60.9 percent remaining, blending the long-term incentive plan and the purchase plan.
• The outstanding figure splits into 6,715,045 options, 2,474,701 unvested restricted stock units and 184,498 performance share units, so options dominate the outstanding pool by more than two to one.
• The 10-K reports 2.1 million full-value shares available inside the long-term incentive plan while the proxy reports 10,185,524 shares of total plan availability. These answer different questions under the plan's share-counting rules and are not a conflict.
• At the $268.42 report share price the 6,715,045 outstanding options carry a gross notional of about $1.802 billion and a rough intrinsic value of about $610.7 million against the $177.48 weighted-average strike. The 2,659,199 combined performance and restricted units carry about $713.8 million of current-price notional before forfeitures and tax.
• The 2025 named-executive options were struck at $337.74 and are out of the money at the $268.42 report snapshot. That does not change the grant-date fair value the proxy reports, but it does change what an executive would actually realise today.

Equity plan capacity at 31 December 2025

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule above is the 2025 officer and key-employee option grant, which vests 34 percent on the third anniversary and 33 percent on each of the fourth and fifth. Regular employee restricted stock units are longer still: 298,499 of the 304,709 units granted in 2025 sat in the five-year bucket against only 6,210 on a one-year schedule. Named-executive performance share units run a three-year performance period with earned units vesting on 1 March 2028, non-management director units vest after one year, and the AssuredPartners inducement awards split between 341,700 units vested immediately at closing and 708,000 units vesting over two to five years from 18 August 2025.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Legal eligibility is not grant prevalence. The 2022 plan text permits awards to all officers, employees and non-management directors, but the Compensation Committee selects grantees, and the disclosed 2025 activity concentrates options entirely in the officer and key-employee population.
• For most employees the realistic equity route is the Employee Stock Purchase Plan, or the Share Incentive Plan in the United Kingdom. Neither is a grant; both require the employee to fund the purchase from payroll.
• The five-year restricted stock unit cliff is a material retention feature and is markedly longer than the four-year annual vesting common in technology companies. An employee who leaves in year four of a five-year cliff receives nothing from that award.
• Planning values disclosed by band run at zero routine grant through B3, $0 to $5,000 at B4, $5,000 to $25,000 at B5, $15,000 to $75,000 at B6, $40,000 to $150,000 at B7, $100,000 to $400,000 at B8 and $300,000 to $2.0 million at B9. These are analyst planning ranges and must not be converted into an employment promise.
• The Deferred Equity Participation Plan and the Deferred Cash Participation Plan are economically different from a grant. They are deferred compensation with long distribution horizons, forfeiture conditions and, in the equity plan's case, notional rather than actual share ownership.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Chicago

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $268.42 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

The 2025 cash columns are inflated by transaction work. Howell and Bay each received a $1,000,000 discretionary bonus, Patrick M. Gallagher received $750,000 and Thomas J. Gallagher received $250,000, all on top of annual incentives that paid at the 200 percent maximum. Read against a normal year, that makes 2025 an unusually generous cash cycle rather than a steady-state one. The pension and deferred-compensation change is also very uneven across the group, at $194,116 for the chief executive and $87,265 for the president against $2,890 for the chief financial officer and zero for the other two.

Board compensation framework

Reported 2025 totals for the directors reviewed ran from about $351,642 to above $398,000, depending on lead-director and committee-chair roles and other compensation. The programme is entirely cash retainer plus a one-year restricted stock unit award; no director options were granted.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The executive cycle is the one part of the calendar with real visibility. Annual cash awards are determined after year-end and paid in cash the following April, and regular long-term equity grants are generally made around 1 March, with separate predetermined dates for retention, new-hire and promotion awards. A public company response on Indeed indicates raises occur at least annually for the general population, but no global cycle or effective month is disclosed.

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 disagree on the share price and the foreign-exchange snapshot. The long-form report freezes $268.42 at 25 August 2026 with an INR rate of 95.25, while the page scaffold uses $271.99 at 24 August 2026 with 95.3594. This report standardises on the long-form report's 26 August 2026 snapshot because every country table in that report is derived from it.
2. 2The bundles compute total compensation as base plus a multiplier that loads variable pay, benefits and selective equity together. A notional benefits allowance is employer cost, not pay, so every total here has been rebuilt as base plus target cash incentive plus annualized equity. Rebuilt totals sit roughly 5 to 10 percent below the bundles' published midpoints at B1 to B5 for exactly that reason.
3. 3The proxy narrative describes a 150 percent non-chief-executive annual cash target in the payout calculation, but the disclosed 2025 payouts of $3,675,000 on a $1,050,000 salary and $3,937,500 on a $1,125,000 salary reconcile only to a 175 percent target at the 200 percent cap. This report uses 175 percent because the arithmetic of the filed amounts requires it, and flags the narrative figure here.
4. 4The United Kingdom country model produces a London senior-band factor slightly above the Chicago anchor, at about 1.07 at B9. That is an artefact of two independently modelled ladders meeting at a level where neither has real evidence, not a disclosure that London senior officers out-earn Chicago ones.
5. 5Australia and India move in opposite directions across the ladder, which is real but rests on very different evidence. The India curve is anchored on dense Bengaluru employee submissions through B4; the Australian curve above B6 is an unanchored planning model built from a single Head of Advisory observation.
6. 6City factors are analytical multipliers applied to a country baseline. They are not published Gallagher cost-of-living adjustments, and no city employee count exists anywhere to weight them.
7. 7The 10-K reports approximately 72,000 employees while the proxy uses a 71,911 starting population for the pay ratio. These are a rounded headcount and an exact measurement-date population, not a conflict.
8. 8The 10-K reports 2.1 million full-value shares available inside the long-term incentive plan while the proxy reports 10,185,524 shares of total plan availability. Different share-counting rules answer different questions.
9. 9Ireland, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates have no company-specific ladder evidence at all. Their bands are low-confidence regional planning models and their benefit entries are statutory frameworks rather than Gallagher plan terms.
10. 10Two insider transactions are excluded rather than misclassified: gifts and trust transfers carry no cash consideration and have no matching transaction type, and a 45,048-share chief executive settlement on 15 March 2026 carries no stated price in the source.
11. 11No enterprise-wide salary hike, pay freeze, pay cut, campus offer revision or delayed joining programme was located in any reviewed source through 26 August 2026. Absence of disclosure is not evidence that increases did not happen.
12. 12Gallagher discloses no geographic revenue split in either the 10-K or the proxy, only a United States and non-United States workforce split and segment workforce proportions, so no regional revenue panel is shown.

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

Gallagher does not publish a comparable multi-year headcount series or any city-level count, so no growth trend can be plotted from the filings. The only geographic signal is the United States and non-United States split. Growth in 2025 was acquisition-driven rather than organic, with AssuredPartners described in the proxy as the largest acquisition in company history and Woodruff Sawyer also highlighted in the 10-K as larger than usual.