How Baker Hughes Pays

Analytical BH-A ladder — L0 through L4 professional

Analytical BH-A ladder — L5 through L9 leadership

Executive — L10 and L11 proxy disclosure

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Baker Hughes publishes formal executive roles and job titles such as Senior Engineer, Staff Engineer, Lead Project Engineer, Principal Engineer, Director, Vice President, Senior Vice President and Executive Vice President, but no filing maps any of them to a grade code.
• The 2017 combination of Baker Hughes with GE Oil and Gas left legacy title and reward-system overlap, and public filings show modern plans administering legacy awards without publishing a completed harmonisation map.
• The July 2026 Chart Industries acquisition adds a further population with its own titles, pay practices and incentive history, so source company and legacy system should be treated as live data fields rather than forced into one purported grade.
• The ASPIRE programme is a two-year rotational early-career scheme with three rotations and is officially described, but no universal grade code or pay band is published for it.
• L10 and L11 are proxy disclosures in United States dollars. They are excluded from the range chart and the location factors applied to those two rows are a mechanical extension of the ladder model rather than a local executive pay quote.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Houston

Baker Hughes publishes no employee count for any city or country, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by headcount. Houston, Bangalore, Florence, Aberdeen, Stavanger, Perth and the Gulf hubs are operationally significant on facilities, postings and business footprint evidence alone.

Houston anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Houston column is the anchor. Medians come from official Baker Hughes United States postings, H-1B labour condition applications and employee-reported Houston records, and are strongest at L4 through L7 where posting ranges exist.
• Country anchors are Houston for the United States, Bangalore for India, a London and Aberdeen blend for the United Kingdom, a Perth and Brisbane blend for Australia, Florence for Italy, a Dubai and Abu Dhabi blend for the United Arab Emirates, Dhahran, Doha, Muscat, Singapore, a Stavanger and Oslo blend for Norway, Rio de Janeiro, Calgary and Kuala Lumpur.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 10 percent of the Houston anchor at intern level and rises towards 42 percent at the SVP band, so the gap narrows from about ten times at entry to under three times at senior leadership.
• Norway is the one market that compresses in the opposite direction. Stavanger sits above Houston at entry level and slightly below it at senior leadership, because Norwegian engineering floors are high and Norwegian executive pay is not.
• Gulf markets show the widest spread of all: Doha and Muscat model at roughly 30 percent of Houston at entry level and above it at senior leadership, but the underlying samples are sparse and expatriate housing, schooling and tax treatment sit outside this model entirely.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• A claim that all employees above some band receive a set number of shares is not supported by any public evidence. The plan's large selection population establishes potential coverage, not award incidence or grant value by grade.
• Post-approval utilisation of the 2026 plan and the amended purchase plan is not publicly disclosed. Dividing outstanding awards by authorised shares would mix incompatible dates and instruments, so no utilisation percentage is reported here.
• Stock-based compensation expense was $203 million in 2025, $202 million in 2024 and $197 million in 2023. That is a company accounting cost and is not equivalent to employee realised value.
• At the $61.98 reference price the 24.761412 million share reserve is worth about $1.53 billion, the 14.408532 million purchase-plan shares about $893 million, the 9.307 million unvested restricted units about $577 million and the 2.094 million performance units about $130 million at target.

Equity plan capacity and 2025 grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Restricted stock units generally vest either as a three-year cliff or as one third annually over three years, and executive grants use the annual pattern. Performance share units run a single three-year performance cycle and settle on certification anywhere between zero and the plan maximum. The 2026 exhibit set includes a non-executive award form with a one-year cliff, and director awards can vest on a different schedule. Unrecognised cost at the 2025 year end was $185 million over 1.77 years for restricted units and $34 million over 1.64 years for performance units.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The purchase plan is the only equity anyone at any level can rely on, and it is funded from the employee's own after-tax pay at 85 percent of fair market value on the exercise date.
• Long-term incentive selection is legally possible from L0 upward because the plan makes all employees eligible, but no routine entitlement is evidenced anywhere below L5 and no minimum eligible grade is published at any level.
• From L5 upward the bundles describe discretionary awards as possible for selected key talent, and from L7 upward as increasingly likely for selected leaders and critical specialists. None of that is a guarantee and none of it comes with a published grant size.
• Only the L10 and L11 rows carry disclosed target values: $1.5 million to $3.0 million among the current non-CEO named executives in 2025 and $12.75 million for the chief executive.
• Stock ownership guidelines are six times base salary for the chief executive, three times for the chief financial officer and two times for other executive officers reporting to the chief executive.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Houston

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $61.98 reference price at 25 August 2026 reference quote and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Ahmed Moghal became Chief Financial Officer in February 2025, generating a promotion long-term incentive award on top of his annual grant, and the 2026 proxy contains his first full named-executive year. Maria Claudia Borras took interim responsibility for Industrial and Energy Technology in October 2025 after Ganesh Ramaswamy's departure while retaining the Chief Growth and Experience Officer role. Jim Apostolides became Senior Vice President leading the new Chart segment in July 2026, which makes integration, retention and role mapping live compensation topics that public reporting has not yet caught up with. Muzzamil Khider Ahmed serves as Chief People and Culture Officer but was not individually disclosed in the 2026 proxy summary table.

Board compensation framework

Reported 2025 director totals ran from $321,500 for Abdulaziz M. Al Gudaimi to $417,200 for W. Geoffrey Beattie, with Gregory D. Brenneman at $411,600, John G. Rice at $368,900, Mohsen Sohi at $349,900, Cynthia B. Carroll at $340,000, Michael Dumais at $327,700 and Shirley Edwards at $322,500. Lynn Elsenhans served a partial year and received $58,600. Director compensation is a governance package rather than an employment band and sits outside the ladder entirely.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The progression model behind this report is a planning framework rather than a Baker Hughes promotion commitment. Typical time before the next level runs 6 to 18 months at intern, 1.5 to 3 years at entry operations, 2 to 4 years through Engineer II, 2 to 5 years at senior engineer, 3 to 5 years at lead or staff and 3 to 6 years from principal through director, after which movement is vacancy driven. The gates shift from technical qualification and safety at entry, through independent delivery and project ownership, to cross-team leadership or recognised specialist depth at senior levels and enterprise scope or succession readiness above that. In technical disciplines a promotion can be achieved on the individual-contributor ladder without becoming a people manager, so title alone can understate technical scope.

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 bundles disagree on Georgia Magno's 2026 open-market sale. One records 19,150 shares at $59.11 on 9 February 2026 under a Form 4 filed 11 February; the other records 5,063 shares at $59.04 on 11 March 2026 under a plan adopted 10 November 2025. Both are shown as one line with the discrepancy noted, because neither is traceable to a single reproduced filing in the source set.
2. 2The bundles also disagree on which chief executive vesting event to show. One reports a 394,196-share performance settlement on 10 March 2025 with 155,117 shares withheld at $41.16; the other reports a 50,857-share restricted unit vest on 26 January 2026 with 17,401 withheld at $56.29. Both are retained because they are different events in different years rather than competing accounts of one event.
3. 3FY2025 H-1B record counts differ across three Department of Labor derived aggregators at 16, 14 and 13. The 16-record consolidated median of $134,250 is used as the headline because it is the widest entity view, and the 13-record visible subset supplies the quartiles because the consolidated quartiles were never published.
4. 4The source bundle loaded 8 to 16 percent of employer benefit cost into its total-reward figures. Those loads have been stripped so that total equals base plus target variable, which makes every total in this report lower than the corresponding figure in the underlying bundle.
5. 5Equity is set to zero for the L0 through L9 bands because no routine long-term incentive entitlement is evidenced below the executive tier. That is a real zero rather than a missing value, but it understates the package for the unknown share of senior employees who are actually selected for an award.
6. 6The location factors applied to the L10 and L11 rows are a mechanical extension of the ladder model. Those two rows are United States dollar proxy disclosures and should be read at the Houston anchor in every market.
7. 7City factors come from the bundle's own calibration table and in two cases sit above what the visa data implies. Oklahoma City is modelled at 0.90 of Houston against a visa city median ratio of about 0.79, and Claremore at 0.86 against about 0.83. Both visa samples contain only two records.
8. 8No Baker Hughes-specific pay sample of adequate size was found for the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Norway or Brazil. Those markets are modelled from regional and occupational benchmarks and carry the lowest confidence in the table.
9. 9Three cities present in the source bundle have been dropped from this table for lack of distinct evidence: Massa and Talamona in Italy and Kolkata in India. A New Zealand placeholder market in one bundle has also been dropped because it carried no compensation evidence at all.
10. 10The 2025 median employee compensation of $68,720 and the headcount of about 56,000 both predate the Chart Industries acquisition. Any 2026 comparison against them will be measuring a different company.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-25

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 — 18 sources

Headcount has fallen by roughly 2,700 across three years while the perimeter itself kept moving, so the trend is not a clean like-for-like series. The 2023 figure is a pay-ratio population measured in October rather than a year-end count, the January 2026 sale of Precision Sensors and Instrumentation for $1.15 billion removed employees, and the July 2026 Chart acquisition added a whole new segment. The 2025 Form 10-K also records $215 million of restructuring charges largely for employee termination and footprint actions, which is a real workforce cost but is not evidence of any compensation freeze.

FY2025 revenue by geography

Baker Hughes disclosed a two-way geographic split for FY2025 rather than a full regional breakdown. The 72 percent international revenue share is consistent with the workforce split of more than 45,000 of about 56,000 employees outside the United States, and both help explain why the SEC median employee sits at $68,720 while United States technical salaries run above $100,000.