How Bank of America Pays

Normalized officer ladder — R1 through R6

Reported United States role track — Band 6 through Vice President

Senior leadership and executive — R7 through R9

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Bank of America does not publish a universal global grade matrix, so R1 to R9 is a normalized research level set built to compare cities and job families, not a claim about internal grades.
• Band 6, Band 5 and Band 4 appear in employee-reported technology data only. They are not confirmed to exist outside those job families or outside the United States.
• A Vice President in operations, technology, wealth management, investment banking or markets can have materially different scope and pay, which is why one Vice President row cannot represent the population.
• Officer titles frequently attach to individual-contributor work. Visa filings show Officer, Assistant Vice President, Vice President, Senior Vice President and Director labels on software engineer, architect and quantitative titles.
• The group carries Merrill Lynch, Countrywide and other legacy title conventions. A complete legacy-to-current band conversion is not publicly disclosed.
• The R8 and R9 rows are proxy-derived executive cohorts and are excluded from the range chart because they compress every other band to a flat line.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Charlotte

Bank of America does not publish city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The only site figure located in public reporting is more than 1,400 employees in Chester, cited alongside the July 2026 MDSec acquisition.

Charlotte anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Charlotte is the anchor because it combines the headquarters, enterprise leadership, technology, operations and risk populations, and because it carries the deepest public wage evidence with 267 indexed FY2025 labour condition applications at a $155,000 median base.
• The Charlotte R1 to R8 midpoints come from the bundle's own location model, constrained by the official $25 an hour wage floor at the bottom and by the disclosed named-officer awards at the top.
• The reported United States role track is priced from national employee submissions rather than Charlotte-specific ones, so applying city factors to those seven rows is a modelling extension rather than a direct observation.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 12 percent of the Charlotte anchor at R1 and rises towards 22 percent at the top of the ladder, and base pay compresses less than total compensation, which is why India carries separate base and total calibration factors.
• The R8 and R9 rows are parent-company executive disclosures converted for comparison only. They are not a local pay range in any selected city and should not be read as one.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 100 million share increase approved in 2025 implied roughly 184.94 million shares of theoretical availability immediately after approval, before subsequent grants, settlements and forfeitures. The precise remaining reserve at the report date is not disclosed in any single current plan table.
• A simple utilisation ratio of the kind Indian issuers publish does not map onto this plan. Multiple award types, forfeiture recycling and share-counting provisions mean that dividing 107 million granted units by 990 million authorised shares would not equal economic utilisation.
• The equity plan proposal reported no stock options outstanding, so option strike prices, exercise windows and underwater-option questions do not arise for the current employee population.
• At the $62.43 reference price the nearly 19 million Sharing Success shares carried an illustrative spot value of about $1.186 billion against the announced $1 billion grant value. The gap is share-price movement between grant pricing and the reference date, not an increase in the award.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Most employee restricted stock units vest 25 percent on each of four annual anniversaries. The named executive time-based units follow the same four-annual-instalment pattern with the first instalment on 15 February 2027, the performance units are a single three-year settlement in 2029 at 0 to 150 percent of target, the chief executive's cash-settled units run in twelve monthly instalments across 2026 and 2027, and director restricted stock vests in one year.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• There is no single rule that equity starts at Vice President. Sharing Success reaches the broad employee population well below senior management, while recurring deferred incentive equity rises with total compensation rather than with title.
• Senior management is generally excluded from Sharing Success, which is the one eligibility boundary the company states directly.
• The analytical grant envelopes in the research bundle run from $0 to $5,000 at R1, $2,000 to $15,000 at R4, $5,000 to $40,000 at R5, $25,000 to $150,000 at R6, $150,000 to $1 million at R7 and $1 million to $30 million at R8. These are estimates, not a published grant schedule.
• Reported employee packages show stock at every reported technology band, from about $1,900 a year for a Software Engineer I to about $12,600 for a Feature Lead, which is consistent with broad eligibility and modest amounts below the senior tiers.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Charlotte

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $62.43 reference price at 25 August 2026 reference and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The two chief executive totals in circulation are both correct and answer different questions. The $41.0 million figure is the Board's decision for performance year 2025, disclosed on 13 February 2026. The $33,711,521 figure is the SEC Summary Compensation Table total for the same year, which includes about $30.67 million of stock awards on a grant-date accounting basis plus salary, the change in pension and nonqualified deferred compensation value, and all other compensation. Mixing them, or comparing one company's performance-year award with another's SEC total, creates false comparisons.

Board compensation framework

The standard 2025 non-management director package was therefore $410,000, of which 68 percent was stock. Maria Martinez's 5,365 share restricted stock award on 4 May 2026 is the annual director grant made under this programme at a zero acquisition price.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Risk and conduct adjustment is the part of the performance system that is officially documented. Incentive processes are reviewed by the risk and audit functions, adverse control, conduct or risk outcomes can reduce or eliminate awards, and deferred equity carries cancellation and clawback provisions. Reuters reported 2025 reductions in Global Banking and Global Markets as part of annual performance reviews, affecting roughly 1 percent of certain business headcount and including senior titles, alongside separate reductions in junior investment-banking roles. That is a real performance-management mechanism, but it is not a published company-wide distribution.

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 headcount because they cite different filings. The 2025 Form 10-K reports about 213,000 employees at 31 December 2025 with 77 percent in the United States, the Q2 2026 Form 10-Q reports about 211,000 at 30 June 2026, and the July 2026 Fast Facts page reports approximately 211,000 in more than 35 countries. This report uses the 10-Q figure as current and the 10-K figure for the year-end trend.
2. 2The bundles use slightly different 25 August 2026 foreign-exchange snapshots, quoting the rupee at 95.7143 and 95.3594 to the dollar. This report standardises on the 95.7143 snapshot because it is the one whose appendix covers every currency used here; the difference moves an Indian cell by about 0.4 percent.
3. 3The two visa extracts disagree on the Jersey City FY2025 record count, at 79 against 55, and on the FY2025 employer median, at $155,000 in the primary index against $153,358 in the H1BGrader profile. Both are preserved separately rather than averaged.
4. 4The reported United States role track is priced from national employee submissions, not from Charlotte observations, so applying city calibration factors to those seven rows extends the model beyond the population it was fitted to. Those rows are labelled reported and their anchor values are exactly as submitted.
5. 5The reported Band 4 investment banking sample at about $375,000 base and $150,000 bonus is deliberately excluded from the band table. Front-office pay moves in the opposite direction to technology and operations pay across markets, with London investment banking Vice President totals of £295,000 to £345,000 exceeding United States corporate Vice President pay, and folding it into one interpolated ladder would misstate whole cities.
6. 6No notional employer benefit load is included in any total compensation cell. Total is base plus target cash variable plus annualised equity and nothing else, so every row reconciles to the sum of its components and represents pay rather than employer cost.
7. 7The R7 and R8 rows sit at the edge of the evidence. India, Manila and other offshore markets show senior-leadership total compensation falling away from the ladder trend, so the calibration factors here are fitted to the R1 through R6 range and extrapolated above it.
8. 8Bank of America discloses no geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so this report carries no regional revenue panel rather than repurposing one.
9. 9The chief executive's SEC Summary Compensation Table components are only partly itemised in the sources: about $30.67 million of stock awards plus salary, the pension and nonqualified deferred compensation change and all other compensation, summing to $33,711,521. This report therefore uses the fully itemised performance-year table for the executive rows and records the SEC total in the notes.
10. 10No company-wide 2025 or 2026 salary freeze, across-the-board salary cut or campus offer revision was identified in any reviewed official source. That is a bounded research finding, not proof that no business-specific or location-specific action occurred.

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 — 17 sources

Headcount has drifted down by roughly 6,000 since 2022 with no year-on-year collapse, which is consistent with attrition management rather than large-scale reduction. The median employee figure moves for a different reason: the person identified as the median is re-selected each year, so the fall to $117,234 in 2024 and the recovery to $123,990 in 2025 track the composition of the workforce as much as its pay.