How AvalonBay Communities Pays

Operations and corporate ladder — A1 through A5

Leadership ladder — A6 through A8

Executive and board tier

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• AvalonBay's public evidence is title ladders, not grades. Leasing runs Community or Leasing Consultant to Sales and Service Supervisor or Assistant Community Manager to Community Manager; service runs Maintenance Technician I and II to Lead Maintenance Technician or Maintenance Supervisor to Maintenance Manager to Senior or Portfolio Maintenance Manager; development runs Manager to Director to Senior Director.
• The A1 to A10 codes were invented for this report and by the underlying research bundle. They must never be represented as an AvalonBay internal band architecture or quoted back to a recruiter as one.
• AvalonBay was an apartment REIT, not a software company, so no Software Engineer I to Principal architecture comparable with large-cap technology employers exists. Visa filings nevertheless evidence Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineering Manager, Senior Manager of Software Engineering, Senior Systems Engineer, Cloud Security Engineer II, Senior Data Scientist and Workday and ServiceNow roles inside the corporate technology function.
• Posting ranges are job-specific and location-specific. Aggregating them into bands is an analytical convenience and each band inherits the role mix of whichever postings happened to be live when the research was carried out.
• The non-employee director row is a governance retainer rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart, as are the two proxy executive cohorts.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Arlington

AvalonBay never published city-level headcount. The only geographic split in the filings is that 1,856 of the 3,021 employees at 31 December 2025 worked on site at communities and 238 worked in the Customer Care Center locations in Virginia Beach, Virginia and San Antonio, Texas.

Arlington anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Arlington column is the anchor and it is really a Washington metro anchor: AvalonBay's headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia, and the two directly usable resident-facing and maintenance postings at that price level are captioned Washington, DC.
• Five of the thirteen bands sit on a direct official posting at or repriced from the anchor: A1 at $52,000, A2B at $65,700, A3B at $87,000, A7 at $224,600 and the three executive and board rows from the proxy statement.
• The Senior Development Director range was posted identically at $161,300 to $271,800 in Texas and in the Carolinas. That single fact is the reason this report interpolates every market toward parity at the top of the ladder instead of applying one flat multiplier.
• The two Customer Care Centers are the cheapest markets in the model. The Virginia Beach Office Manager posting reprices to about 82 percent of the Arlington anchor at that seniority, which is why Virginia Beach starts at 0.74 and San Antonio slightly below it.
• The A9 and A10 rows are proxy disclosures for corporate officers based at the headquarters. They are company-level values and should not be multiplied by a market factor.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Outstanding awards at 15 March 2026 broke down as 294,892 stock options at 0.21 percent dilution, 191,066 restricted shares at 0.14 percent, 262,887 target performance shares at 0.19 percent and 100,542 restricted stock units at 0.07 percent, for 849,387 units at 0.61 percent in total.
• Outstanding options carried a $183 weighted-average exercise price and a 5.72-year weighted-average remaining contractual life, a legacy position rather than a live grant practice, because options were an officer election rather than a default award.
• Adding the new 4,000,000-share reserve to the 849,387 outstanding awards gives a potential 4,849,387 units, about 3.48 percent basic dilution. That is a capacity measure, not outstanding dilution.
• At the merger close the Vivmark Form S-8 registered 2,381,150 shares for assumed 2009-plan awards, 34,714 shares for assumed 2026-plan awards and 2,250,000 shares for future grants to eligible legacy AvalonBay individuals from the adjusted 2026-plan reserve. Those post-close figures supersede any pre-merger pool arithmetic.
• A 2026 equity valuation must now distinguish legacy grant-date AvalonBay value from post-close Vivmark-converted value at the 2.793 exchange ratio, because the underlying AVB share no longer trades.

Equity plan capacity and award activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule above is the officer annual stock bonus, which vests ratably over three years whether it is taken as restricted stock or as value-equivalent options. The three-year performance award works differently: it is measured over a full three-year period and settles in a single instalment once the compensation committee certifies achievement, as the 2023 to 2025 cycle did on 26 February 2026 at 134.6 percent of target. Vesting terms for the non-officer equity population were never published, and the 2026 plan imposes only a one-year minimum with a limited carve-out.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The single most useful public statement about AvalonBay equity is that recent practice generally made long-term incentive awards to associates who had attained officer, senior director or, in field offices, director, and that about 140 associates were eligible. Against roughly 3,041 employees that is under 5 percent of the workforce.
• The disclosure names field-office director explicitly and is silent on corporate director, so the threshold is not symmetric across the company and a corporate director should not assume eligibility from the field-office language.
• Everyone below that line had the employee stock purchase plan instead, generally available after one calendar month, which is a materially different proposition: it is employee-funded at a 15 percent effective discount rather than a company grant.
• No grant size, grant table or annual refresh value was ever published for any band below the named executive officers, which is why the equity column reads zero for bands A1 through A8 in this report rather than carrying a modeled number.
• Stock options were not a recurring default award. Officers could elect to receive part or all of an upcoming annual stock bonus as value-equivalent options, which is how the chief executive's $482,365 of 2025 option awards arose.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Arlington

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $184.06 reference price at 14 August 2026 close, the last AvalonBay close cited before the merger and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Merger materials disclosed that Schall's annual total target compensation at the combined company would be no less than $9.75 million and that O'Shea's 2027 base salary was set at $675,000. Both are Vivmark transition terms rather than legacy 2025 AvalonBay pay and should never be blended into the AvalonBay tables. AvalonBay separately disclosed that no named executive received a base salary increase during 2025 and that the chief executive's target total compensation still rose 8.3 percent to $9,750,000, entirely through variable components rather than salary.

Board compensation framework

The board package is a governance retainer rather than employment pay and is excluded from the range chart. It is nevertheless a useful reference point: a non-employee director's $300,000 core annual package sat above every non-officer band in this report and above the posted Senior Development Director midpoint, which says something about how thin the disclosed employee equity population actually was.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The clearest published progression evidence is the field career path rather than a timetable: Community or Leasing Consultant to Sales and Service Supervisor or Assistant Community Manager to Community Manager is supported directly in AvalonBay careers material, and the maintenance ladder from Technician I and II through Lead Technician or Supervisor to Manager and Senior or Portfolio Manager is visible across the posted ranges. What is missing everywhere is timing. The promotion year ranges shown against each band in this report are market heuristics for multifamily operations, not AvalonBay policy.

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. 1This report rests on a single research bundle rather than two or three, so there is no second source to cross-check a disputed figure against. Where the bundle itself flags an internal conflict it is recorded below.
2. 2The bundle's own conflict is at the Vice President layer. A small-sample third-party site shows roughly $174,000 to $299,000 of total pay for the title, which is lower than AvalonBay's official Senior Development Director posting of $161,300 to $271,800 and lower than the modelled $300,000 base used in the A8 row. The bundle rates the third-party figure low confidence and this report follows it, so the A8 row is an interpolation between two traceable anchors rather than a sourced number.
3. 3No employer benefit load has been added to any total. The 401(k) match, medical cost, the 20 percent apartment discount and the employee stock purchase plan discount are employer cost and employee benefit, not pay, and every total in the band table reconciles to base plus bonus plus equity plus disclosed other compensation.
4. 4The A1 through A8 total compensation figures equal base because AvalonBay disclosed no standardised bonus target and no equity grant size at those levels. They are floors, not estimates of real packages, and the understatement is largest at A6 and A7 where the associate is inside the equity population.
5. 5Band anchors are built from whichever official postings were live when the research was carried out. A4 in particular mixes a corporate Design Manager at an Arlington midpoint of $110,050 with field manager roles that reprice near $99,000, so the band carries real internal spread.
6. 6Market factors for Boston, Seattle and San Antonio rest on operating-region status alone, because no posted salary range was located for any of the three. They are a grade less reliable than the markets with direct postings.
7. 7The research bundle carries a 25 August 2026 foreign exchange snapshot of 95.3594 rupees and 1.3974 Australian dollars to the United States dollar. Neither is used anywhere in this report, because AvalonBay had no material employee presence outside the United States and inventing local salary tables for India or Australia would have described the law rather than the employer.
8. 8The dollar values on the February 2026 Form 4 acquisitions are computed at the $179.67 per share price disclosed for that date, because the filings themselves record a $0 price for award settlements. The 17 August 2026 merger conversion values use the last cited AvalonBay close of $184.06 for the same reason.
9. 9Benjamin Schall's 17 August 2026 Form 4 records the conversion of his entire position without a share count, so no insider row exists for the chief executive at the merger close.
10. 10AvalonBay disclosed no geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so no regional revenue panel is shown. Total 2025 revenue of $3,040,725,000 appears in the key metrics instead.
11. 11No company-wide salary freeze, salary cut, hike percentage or off-cycle correction was located anywhere in the 2024 to August 2026 materials. The material compensation event of the period is the merger.
12. 12A 2025 company-wide turnover rate was not identified. The roughly 25 percent total, 18 percent voluntary and 8 percent involuntary figures come from the 2024 corporate responsibility disclosure and the components do not reconcile exactly because each is rounded.

Source register — 14 sources

The workforce was essentially flat across three years, moving between roughly 2,988 and 3,041 people, which is a very different profile from a growth-stage employer and consistent with an operator running a stable owned portfolio. The only geographic split ever published is functional rather than regional: 61 percent of the 31 December 2025 population worked on site at communities and 8 percent worked in the two Customer Care Centers. The 2024 corporate responsibility disclosure reported total turnover of about 25 percent, split roughly 18 percent voluntary and 8 percent involuntary, which for a workforce dominated by on-site community roles is unremarkable for the sector.