How AT&T Pays

Operations and individual contributor ladder — B0 through B4

Management ladder — M1 through M4

Executive and board — M5 through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The B and M codes are a research taxonomy. AT&T has never published a global grade map, and presenting these codes as internal HR codes would be wrong.
• Titles vary materially by function. Senior Specialist, Principal, Associate Director and Director appear in technology and commercial postings, while frontline retail and field roles follow collective bargaining wage ladders instead.
• Employee-reported level languages such as the Levels.fyi L1 and L2 steps, career-site titles and corporate officer titles are not proven to be one unified numbering scheme.
• Legacy WarnerMedia stock arrangements remain relevant only for outstanding or converted rights. No evidence supports treating WarnerMedia grades as AT&T's current hierarchy.
• Vice President, Senior Vice President, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers.
• The independent 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 Dallas

AT&T discloses country-level headcount but not city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. Dallas is headquarters and Plano, Atlanta, Bothell and Middletown are significant technical worksites in the visa record, but a defensible city ranking is not publicly disclosed.

Dallas anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Dallas column is the anchor. The B3, B4, M2 and M3 medians come from current AT&T job postings, which publish real base ranges; B0 through B2 blend those postings with Levels.fyi and Glassdoor submissions.
• Plano carries the strongest observed salary evidence of any AT&T location, including the senior specialist software engineering posting at $118.8k to $178.2k base and 799 multi-year visa wage records.
• India professional and technical total pay commonly appears at roughly 17 to 25 percent of the United States figure in dollar terms, rising towards 32 percent at the officer tiers, so the report uses a level-dependent factor rather than one country multiplier.
• Mexico is the second-largest disclosed country workforce at 15,481 employees, but AT&T publishes no Mexican salary bands, so both Mexican cities are modeled against the Dallas anchor.
• The M7 and chief executive rows are proxy disclosures converted for comparison only. They are global executive values and not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 2026 plan's utilisation rate cannot yet be calculated because AT&T expressly described future award allocations as not determinable at the time of approval.
• The proxy estimated total overhang rising from approximately 1.35 percent to approximately 2.78 percent if the 2026 plan was approved, against a three-year average burn rate of approximately 0.43 percent.
• The second research bundle reports approximately 41 million shares authorized for future grant under AT&T stock plans at 31 December 2025, a different measurement date and basis from the 29,731,233 available under the 2018 plan at 28 February 2026.
• A clean post-effective utilisation percentage for the deferral plan is not publicly determinable, because the 6,156,312 available shares and 13,159,473 shares of related rights were both measured before the restatement took effect.

Equity plan capacity and participation

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Named-executive restricted stock units carry a three-year restriction period with annual ratable vesting, and Form 4 footnotes for the 2025 awards show one-third vesting on each of 15 February 2026, 2027 and 2028. Performance shares are a single three-year cycle settled on certification. A separate crowdsourced clue from Levels.fyi describes a four-year employee schedule with 25 percent at the first anniversary and monthly vesting thereafter; that is not an official universal AT&T schedule and may reflect specific grant agreements.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Legal eligibility and actual participation are different populations. Around 75,000 management employees are eligible under the 2026 plan, while AT&T expected awards generally for about 3,400 mid-level-and-above managers.
• No routine broad-based grant is disclosed at B0 through B4. Small stock values appear in some crowdsourced submissions but are insufficient to establish a formal eligibility threshold.
• The 10-K describes stock-based awards for senior and other management employees without specifying a title threshold, so associate director is the plausible boundary for recurring participation rather than a published rule.
• Modeled grant envelopes run about $0 to $20,000 at manager, $5,000 to $40,000 at associate director, $25,000 to $125,000 at director, $75,000 to $350,000 at senior director, $250,000 to $1.50 million at vice president and $2.00 million to $11.00 million at the senior officer tier.
• Named-executive settlement is a mixed instrument: performance-share settlement is disclosed as roughly 66 percent cash and 34 percent common stock, so about half of annual long-term distribution value arrives as shares once the restricted stock unit component is included.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Dallas

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $25.62 reference price at 25 August 2026 quote and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

David McAtee's 2025 cash includes a $300,000 discretionary award on top of the $3.08 million formula outcome, which is why his cash incentive line exceeds the uniform 112 percent result. Lori Lee's filed 2025 salary of $875,000 sits below her $900,000 target base used in the short-term incentive calculation. Jeff McElfresh's $11.0 million of stock awards exceeds his $9.0 million long-term target because the filed amount includes a special award, so his grant is the clearest example in the table of why target and reported pay diverge.

Board compensation framework

Individual 2025 director totals generally landed in the mid $300,000s to low $400,000s before unusual items. William Kennard was shown at $431,312, while Scott Ford's $610,000 includes a substantial other compensation element. No stock options were granted to directors.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Collective bargaining creates a parallel and much more visible progression system for the roughly 43 percent of employees it covers. A Communications Workers of America agreement reported in May 2025 for the Southwest included a 5 percent increase in 2025, 3.25 percent in 2026, 3 percent in 2027 and 3.25 percent in 2028, for 15.29 percent compounded growth plus a ratification bonus. October 2024 agreements covering roughly 23,000 employees included minimum compounded wage growth of about 15 percent over four years in the West and more than 19 percent over five years in the Southeast. Nothing comparable is published for non-bargained employees.

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 H-1B counts and medians. Ellis reports 511 FY2025 filings at a $150,000 median, H1BData.info 506 records at $165,000, H1BGrader 546 certified at $163,400 and MyVisaJobs 575 at a $168,548 average. This report preserves every figure separately because the aggregators use different legal entities, periods and status categories.
2. 2City-level H-1B percentiles come from a multi-year H1BVisaJobs slice covering FY2021 to FY2026, while the second bundle carries single-year 2025 city medians of $162,498 for Plano, $166,958 for Dallas, $142,956 for Atlanta and $151,675 for Alpharetta with the quartiles unpublished. The two cannot be merged, so the table uses the multi-year slice and the single-year values are recorded in the dataset notes.
3. 3The bundles disagree on the equity pool measurement. One reports 29,731,233 shares available under the 2018 plan at 28 February 2026, the other approximately 41 million shares authorized for future grant under all AT&T stock plans at 31 December 2025. Both are quoted with their own date and basis rather than reconciled.
4. 4The bundles disagree on the insider trade record. One shows a Desroches withholding of 52,252.475 shares at $28.98 on 10 March 2026, the other a withholding of 10,504 shares at $28.80 on 13 February 2026 alongside a 28,389-share restricted stock unit vest. Both appear in the table because they are separate events on separate dates.
5. 5The reference share price differs between bundles at $25.62 for the 25 August 2026 quote and $25.69 for the 24 August 2026 close. This report standardises on $25.62 and notes that the orientation values on zero-price grant lines shift slightly with the choice.
6. 6Lori Lee's filed 2025 salary of $875,000 sits below the $900,000 base used in her short-term incentive target calculation, so base pay and target base are not the same number for that row.
7. 7The vice president and senior vice president rows are entirely modeled. AT&T publishes no compensation table for either layer, and the modeled envelopes are calibrated against the filed named-executive long-term targets rather than against any disclosed band.
8. 8AT&T publishes no geographic revenue split in either bundle, so this report carries no regional revenue panel and uses the disclosed country workforce counts as its only geographic anchor.
9. 9No companywide 2025 or 2026 salary hike percentage, salary freeze, pay cut or off-cycle correction programme was located in any source. Workforce reductions and hub consolidation are separate from a companywide salary action and should not be read as one.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-24

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 fallen by more than 29,000 people since January 2023, a reduction of about 19 percent, while named-executive incentives paid above target in each of the last three years. AT&T does not disclose employee attrition on any basis comparable with peer reporting, and customer churn is a different metric entirely. City-level headcount is not published in any country, so the only geographic signal in the filings is the 1 October 2025 country split of 106,871 in the United States, 15,481 in Mexico, 4,115 in India and 4,640 elsewhere.