How Ball Corporation Pays

Operations and professional ladder — B0 through B4

Leadership ladder — B5 through B8

Executive — B9 and B10

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Ball does not publish a global grade dictionary, a salary structure, band minimums or midpoints for any population below executive leadership, and the reviewed sources contain no post-Rexam grade harmonisation matrix from the 2016 acquisition.
• The published United States figures are hiring ranges from live job advertisements. A posted minimum and maximum can be wider or narrower than the internal grade and can cover several states or work arrangements at once.
• Ball's own postings warn that the advertised title may differ from the title in the employment contract because of local title structures and global HR systems, so a title match is not a grade match.
• Hourly figures annualise the posted rate at 2,080 hours and exclude overtime, shift premiums and collective bargaining terms. About 20 percent of North American and 33 percent of European employees were covered by collective bargaining at the 2025 year end, so site agreements can override any market observation.
• The B9 and B10 rows are proxy disclosures for a handful of named individuals, not a band with a population, and they are excluded from the range chart because they blow out the scale.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Westminster, Colorado

Ball publishes no city-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank sites by employee count. Poland, Serbia, Spain, Egypt and Hungary appear on the current network map or in the January 2026 Benepack acquisition but carry no usable salary observation, so they are omitted from the priced list rather than given an invented factor. Australia is omitted entirely: no Australian site appears on the February 2025 network map.

Westminster, Colorado anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Westminster column is the anchor. B0, B2, B4, B5, B7 and B8 come from current Ball job advertisements; B1 and B3 come from employee-reported United States observations; B6 extends a posted senior manager range into the plant-leadership envelope.
• India is the clearest compression case in the data. Company-posted and employee-reported observations run at roughly 7 to 9 percent of the Westminster anchor at technician level and about 41 percent at plant-leadership level, so the gap narrows from more than ten times to about two and a half times.
• Brazil and Mexico show the same shape less steeply, from about 9 and 11 percent of the anchor at plant entry to roughly 33 and 38 percent at supervisor and manager level.
• Western Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada are close to flat against the anchor at roughly 0.71 to 0.82, because United States plant hourly pay is comparatively low while European and Canadian operator and technician pay is comparatively high.
• The B9 and B10 rows are United States proxy disclosures. They do not localise and should not be read as a pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Full-value awards count 2.98 plan shares each while options and appreciation rights count one for one, so the nominal reserve cannot be read as one grantable restricted stock unit per share. Forfeitures recycle under the plan rules.
• The 15,000,000 shares approved in April 2026 were about 5.6 percent of the 266,153,058 shares outstanding at 27 February 2026, and the proxy rationale expected the amendment to support awards for another six to eight years.
• A nominal pro-forma availability of 24,551,038 shares can be constructed by adding the 15,000,000 to the 9,551,038 available at the year end, but that is analytical arithmetic. It ignores grants made after 31 December 2025 and the fungible share counting, and is not a current pool balance.
• Ball disclosed an average historical usage rate of roughly 8 percent of the authorised amount a year over the prior nine years. The live post-amendment balance is not publicly disclosed.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The table is the stock option schedule: 25 percent on each of the first four grant anniversaries, with a ten-year maximum term and an exercise price set at grant-date fair market value. Restricted stock units granted to executives in 2025 and 2026 use a three-year cliff instead, so nothing vests in years one and two and the whole award lands at the third anniversary. Performance share units are a single settlement on certification at the end of the three-year performance framework, anywhere between 0 and 220 percent of target. Director restricted stock units are an annual award whose settlement terms sit in the individual award documentation. No standard employee grant schedule exists in the reviewed sources because no standard employee grant is disclosed.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Equity is selective rather than broad-based annual pay. At 31 December 2025 approximately 360 people were eligible to participate in the incentive plan: about 350 employees at a grade eligible for annual awards plus 10 nonemployee directors. That is roughly 2.2 percent of a 16,000-person workforce.
• Around 110 additional employees a year receive one-off awards through the annual talent review, outside the annual-award grades, plus occasional recruitment and retention awards. Reach is therefore wider than the 350 figure alone suggests, but it is discretionary rather than scheduled.
• The internal grade name at which annual equity begins is not disclosed, and no typical grant range is published for Director, Senior Director or Vice President outside the named executives. Do not read the absence of a disclosed grant at B0 to B5 as proof that no employee at those levels ever receives equity.
• The employee stock purchase plan is the one equity vehicle described as broad-based, but its contribution limit, match formula and country-by-country availability are all undisclosed, so its value to any individual employee cannot be estimated from public sources.
• Stock ownership guidelines are six times base salary for the chief executive and three times base salary for the chief financial officer and other senior vice presidents and executive vice presidents.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Westminster, Colorado

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $64.06 reference price at 25 August 2026 market observation and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Three of the seven named executives in the 2025 table are former officers or partial-year appointees, which is why the salary column reads low across the board. Scott A. Vail's total includes a $345,000 sign-on bonus following a rehire, and he received no 2025 short-term incentive payout. Howard H. Yu appears as former executive vice president and chief financial officer, and Daniel W. Fisher as former chairman and chief executive. Ball reviews named-executive base salaries in January with changes effective 1 January, and targets executive base salary around the fiftieth percentile of its market data.

Board compensation framework

The ten nonemployee directors are counted inside the roughly 360-person incentive plan eligible population, so the director restricted stock units draw on the same reserve as executive awards. A director on the standard programme receives $300,000 a year before chair and committee fees, of which 58 percent is equity.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one hard timing rule is executive: base salaries are reviewed in January with changes effective 1 January, annual equity is granted in the first quarter and typically in January or February, and new-hire and promotion awards are generally made on the fifteenth of the following month. Ball states that it considers job responsibility, performance and contribution, tenure and experience, country-specific pay increase budgets, external market movement and fiftieth-percentile market competitiveness when setting executive pay. The country increase budget language is the only public confirmation that Ball runs geography-specific merit budgets at all.

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 research bundles disagree on the foreign exchange snapshot. One quotes 95.25 rupees, 0.733986 pounds and 0.858042 euros to the dollar at 25 August 2026, the other 95.3594, 0.733115 and 0.85681 on the same date. This report uses the first set throughout for internal consistency; the difference moves converted figures by roughly a tenth of a percent.
2. 2The two bundles also quote different reference share prices: $64.06 at 25 August 2026 and about $64.42 at 24 August 2026. The $64.06 figure is used here because it is the later observation, and it is the basis for the restricted stock unit illustration values.
3. 3The bundles describe the 2025 executive short-term incentive weighting slightly differently. One gives 80 percent organisational and 20 percent individual with the business half built from adjusted operating cash flow and unit volume; the other resolves the organisational half into 60 percent cash flow and 20 percent volume. Both reconcile to the same 140 percent payout and both are carried here.
4. 4One narrative line in the proxy describes the 2025 performance share unit period as ending 31 December 2026 while the grants table labels it 2025 to 2027 and repeatedly calls it a three-year period. This report treats 2025 to 2027 as the intended period and flags the inconsistency rather than silently reconciling it.
5. 5The B9 row is a target direct compensation construction, not a Summary Compensation Table total. It combines the median current named-executive base, an 80 to 90 percent incentive target and the median 2025 target long-term incentive across the continuing non-chief-executive named executives, because the reported totals for 2025 are distorted by mid-year appointments and departures.
6. 6Named-executive short-term incentive dollar targets are derived by dividing the disclosed payout by the disclosed 140 percent factor, because Ball publishes the payout rather than the target in dollars.
7. 7India, Brazil, Mexico and the Saudi affiliate carry level-dependent factors, but their observed curves are convex while the interpolation between the junior and senior factor is linear. The model therefore runs slightly high against the observations at the professional bands and slightly low at plant-leadership level. India has no disclosed evidence at all above senior manager, so the factors at B7 and above for that market are extrapolations.
8. 8The Bengaluru row is a comparison market only. No Ball site appears there on the February 2025 network map, and it is priced on India country-level observations rather than any city-specific evidence.
9. 9Poland, Serbia, Spain, Egypt, Hungary, Switzerland and Turkey appear on the network map or in the January 2026 Benepack acquisition but carry no usable salary observation, so they are omitted from the priced location list rather than assigned an invented factor. Australia is excluded entirely.
10. 10United States plant cities are all set to a factor of 1 because Ball's advertisements quote national or multi-state ranges. That records the absence of a disclosed city differential; it is not a finding that Fairfield and Findlay pay the same.
11. 11Total compensation here is base plus target variable pay plus annualised equity only. No notional employer benefit load has been added, and overtime, shift premiums, relocation and launch-team travel are all excluded, which understates realized earnings for plant populations.
12. 12The 2018 H-1B wage record is eight years old and unindexed, and the fiscal 2026 approval count comes from a USCIS dataset that is not directly comparable with the Department of Labor application counts shown beside it.

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 — 14 sources

Ball does not publish an attrition rate, and the aerospace sale rules out using the headcount series as a proxy for one. The only durable geographic signal in the filings is the roughly 30 to 70 split between United States and international employees, which is the reverse of the disclosure balance: the United States carries almost all of the public pay evidence while carrying under a third of the workforce.