How Berkshire Hathaway Pays

Frontline and professional — B0 through B2

Senior professional and management — B3 through B5

Leadership — B6 and B7

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• BNSF postings disclose selected internal salary bands such as 29, 30 and 31 for supervisors, managers and assistant division engineers, which proves an internal grade structure exists at BNSF but is not enough to reconstruct it or to map it onto any other Berkshire company.
• Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance uses a conventional insurance title ladder of analyst, underwriter, senior underwriter, manager, assistant vice president and vice president, with many employer-posted ranges, but no numeric grade taxonomy was found behind those titles.
• GEICO technology postings use engineer, senior, staff and senior-staff or manager titles with very broad market ranges, indicating a modern dual individual-contributor and management ladder that is not transferable to the manufacturing, railroad or utility companies.
• Northern Powergrid runs a regulated-utility progression with apprenticeship and qualification gates, publishing a trainee rate that steps up on qualification rather than on a grade promotion.
• No public evidence of a post-acquisition grade harmonisation programme was found. The operating model deliberately preserves legacy company titles, union agreements and professional ladders, so a single Berkshire band table would be an invention.
• Berkshire named executive officers are excluded from the band rows entirely. Including a worldwide $22 million cash row in a ladder priced by city calibration factors would push every offshore market towards parity at the top and produce absurd cells, so those figures are carried only in the executive section.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Omaha

Berkshire publishes operating-company headcount but not city-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by employee count. The disclosed 2025 operating-company totals are BNSF 34,880, GEICO 29,541, Pilot 29,285, Marmon 28,387, Precision Castparts 25,168, McLane 24,876, Clayton Homes 22,246, IMC and ISCAR 14,206, NetJets 9,438, Lubrizol 7,690, Northern Powergrid 3,162, Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance 1,481 and the corporate office 28.

Omaha anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Omaha column is the United States portfolio normalisation from the source research, not a survey of Omaha employers. It runs from a $50,350 base midpoint at B0 to $475,000 at B7 and is the reference against which every other city is calibrated.
• The strongest employer evidence sits in three cities. Fort Worth carries BNSF's posted engineering ranges and its salary bands 29 to 31, Boston carries Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance's posted ranges with stated annual bonus eligibility, and Chevy Chase carries GEICO's posted technology ranges.
• India runs at roughly 12 to 14 percent of the anchor at B0 and 44 to 47 percent at B7, the widest level-dependent compression in the report. Pune sits above Bangalore and Mumbai because the Lubrizol global capability centre competes for technology and business-services talent.
• Fort Worth is the only market that rises steeply against the anchor with seniority, from 1.34 times at B0 to 1.84 times at B7, reflecting BNSF's posted staff and engineering-manager ranges of $225,000 to $300,000.
• Australia and Canada run the opposite way. Sydney sits at 1.07 times the anchor at B0 and 0.68 times at B7, and Toronto at 1.00 and 0.65, because entry pay in those markets is high relative to the United States while senior specialty-insurance pay is not.
• Named executive officer compensation is a worldwide Omaha disclosure and is deliberately excluded from the location grid. There is no Berkshire executive pay scale in Bangalore, London or Sydney to report.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The word ESOP means something different inside Berkshire than it does at a technology company. General Re's plan and the subsidiary Berkshire stock funds are qualified retirement-plan assets, and BNSF's offering is a purchase plan. None of them is a recurring grant.
• No BSE, NSE or SEBI machinery applies. Berkshire is a United States issuer listed on the New York Stock Exchange, so the relevant filings are the proxy statement, Forms 4, Forms 11-K and Schedules 13D and 13G rather than any Indian employee-share allotment.
• Because there is no grant pool, there is also no dilution management story, no buyback-to-offset-issuance argument and no unvested equity overhang for employees to model. Berkshire repurchases stock for capital-allocation reasons that have nothing to do with employee compensation.
• An employee who wants Berkshire equity exposure generally has to buy it, either through a subsidiary retirement-plan fund where one exists or on the open market. That is a materially different risk profile from a granted position.

What exists in place of a grant pool

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

A standard four-year, 25 percent per year vesting chart would be false for Berkshire and is deliberately not shown. The reviewed parent and subsidiary disclosures establish no recurring grant programme, so the only vesting concepts in the group are retirement-plan vesting rules governed by each plan document, and Benjamin Moore's disclosed employer contributions are fully vested on contribution.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Equity eligibility is not a function of band. At every level from B0 to B7 the answer is the same: no parent grant is identified, and whatever plan exposure an employee has comes from their specific employer and plan eligibility rather than from their seniority.
• Subsidiary CEOs are not an exception. The proxy says their incentives may be large and are generally tied to controllable operating results, but it describes those incentives as compensation arrangements rather than as Berkshire equity.
• Named executive officers receive no equity either. Abel, Jain, Hamburg and Buffett all show a zero in the stock award column of the 2025 Summary Compensation Table, and Abel's 2026 salary arrangement disclosed no equity award.
• Berkshire insiders do hold very large personal stakes, but those are ownership positions built by purchase and inheritance rather than by compensation. Warren Buffett's holdings and his annual charitable transfers are ownership events, not employee equity.

Named executive target equity

The parallel $20,000,000 salaries and identical $2,000,000 bonuses paid to Abel and Jain in 2025 are the clearest evidence that Berkshire sets corporate executive pay by judgement rather than by a benchmarking process. Marc Hamburg's $4,330,000 is the only disclosed pay for a functional corporate officer below vice chairman. Beneath that layer the disclosure stops entirely: no operating-company chief executive's compensation appears in any Berkshire filing, even though several of them run businesses that would be large public companies in their own right.

Board compensation framework

Berkshire's director fee schedule is roughly two orders of magnitude below the large-cap norm, where a $60,000 cash retainer plus a $250,000 to $350,000 annual equity award is typical. The structure is deliberate: directors are not indemnified by a large fee stream and are expected to hold shares bought with their own money.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The only defensible progression guide is the experience window attached to each research band: B0 to B2 generally covers 0 to 6 years, B3 to B5 roughly 5 to 15 years, B6 and B7 12 to 25 years and more, and subsidiary chief executive roles sit above that. These windows overlap heavily because they span railroad operations, insurance underwriting, aerospace manufacturing and consumer products, and they are not promotion guarantees.

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. 1Berkshire named executive officers are deliberately excluded from the band rows. A worldwide $22 million cash figure placed at the top of a ladder that is priced by city calibration factors would drag every offshore market towards parity at the senior end and produce cells such as an India business head on a United States vice chairman's salary. The four named executives are carried in the executive section instead, and the band table stops at B7.
2. 2The band table also stops short of the operating-company chief executive layer, which sits between B7 and the parent named executives. Berkshire discloses nothing about it, so inventing a row would have been the only way to include it.
3. 3The source research quoted a total cost to company that adds a notional employer-benefit load of roughly 7 to 13 percent on top of base and target variable. That is employer cost rather than pay, so it has been stripped and every total here is base plus target bonus, which reconciles exactly.
4. 4The two research bundles use different foreign exchange snapshots, 24 August 2026 and 25 August 2026, and disagree on the rupee at 95.774733 against 95.4125. This report standardises on the 24 August 2026 XE table because every United States dollar conversion in the larger bundle's location tables was computed from it.
5. 5The two bundles also disagree on the top of the ladder. The larger one normalises to B0 through B8 with B8 as subsidiary chief executive and Berkshire named executive combined; the smaller one splits that into a B8 regional and subsidiary executive tier and a B9 Berkshire corporate tier. This report uses the larger bundle's B0 to B7 employee rows and treats the executive layers separately.
6. 6The larger bundle covers 40 markets and this report carries 30. The ten omitted are Brisbane, Perth, Vancouver, Munich, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Dublin, Bloomington and Bethel, all of which were modelled rather than observed and most of which duplicate the factor of a retained city in the same country.
7. 7Base and total calibration factors are identical for every city because the source research applies the same variable-pay target range to every location. If a subsidiary in a particular market runs materially different bonus targets, that is not publicly disclosed and this report cannot show it.
8. 8Insider gifts and share-class conversions cannot be represented in the trade table because the schema has no gift category. Warren Buffett's June 2025 transfer of 12,360,000 Class B shares and his November 2025 conversion of 1,800 Class A shares are described in the insider context notes instead.
9. 9The two bundles record different Ajit Jain sales, a 200 Class A share sale on 9 September 2024 at an average $695,417.65 and a 15,000 Class B share sale on 26 September 2025 at $500.998. Both are retained as separate events because the filings are separate.
10. 10Berkshire discloses no geographic revenue split in either bundle, so the regional revenue panel is omitted entirely rather than repurposed.
11. 11No group salary hike, freeze, campus offer revision or off-cycle correction was located for any year, so the news section carries structural and governance events rather than pay actions.

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 group has shrunk by about 8,700 people over two years, a little over 2 percent, without any consolidated restructuring disclosure. Because Berkshire reports only a total and a set of operating-company counts, the shape of that decline can be inferred only where a subsidiary has been reported on separately, as GEICO was. No group attrition rate is published, so the split between voluntary and involuntary departures is unknown.