How Best Buy Pays

Technology and product ladder — GL6 through GL10

Management ladder — GL9 Manager through GL12

Corporate leadership — Vice President

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• GL6 through GL12 appears consistently in United States, India and Canada technology and product salary submissions, but Best Buy has never published a grade catalogue, so the evidence does not establish that a store associate, a distribution manager, a finance analyst and a software engineer sit in the same scheme.
• The GL10 label spans a senior individual contributor and a senior manager in public data, and GL9 appears in both the engineering and management samples, so role family matters more than the number alone.
• Vice President, Executive Vice President, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer are official Best Buy titles rather than hidden grade numbers, and no filing maps them to a GL.
• The retail R1 to R4 stages used in the source bundles are analytical normalisations invented to make unlike job postings comparable. They are not Best Buy-issued grades and they are not carried into the band table here.
• No material predecessor-grade harmonisation or post-merger band system was disclosed in the reviewed 2024 to 2026 filings. The Best Buy Health restructuring and the Mexico exit changed the footprint, not a disclosed enterprise grade architecture.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Richfield

Best Buy publishes no city-level headcount for any market except the 430-person Bengaluru hub and the 115-person China sourcing office. United States and Canadian city entries therefore describe operating role and pay calibration, not office size. Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Sydney and Mexico City appear in the source bundles as footprint or legal-entity notes with no compensation evidence and are excluded here rather than given fabricated factors.

Richfield anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Richfield column is the anchor. GL6 through GL10 medians come from Levels.fyi United States software and product records dated 18 to 19 August 2026, and the GL9 Manager and GL10 Senior Manager rows come from the same source's management sample.
• GL11, GL12 and Vice President are midpoints of posted company base ranges combined with the bundles' modelled total envelopes, rebuilt so that base plus bonus plus equity reconciles to the total shown.
• Bengaluru is calibrated from four directly observed levels: GL7 at 1.80 million rupees, GL8 at 2.87 million, GL9 at 4.63 million and GL10 at up to 7.26 million. India total compensation runs at roughly 17 percent of the Richfield anchor at GL7 and about 35 percent at GL10, so the report gives India a rising factor rather than one flat multiplier.
• Vancouver is calibrated from Canadian technology records where GL7 sits at about 68 percent of the United States total, GL8 at about 49 percent and GL9 at about 58 percent. The GL8 sample reads below GL7, which is sampling noise rather than an internal salary inversion, so the Canadian curve here is deliberately smoothed and should be treated as the weakest calibration in the report.
• Executive rows are deliberately absent from the band table. The Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer figures are single global proxy disclosures that are identical in every city, and interpolating city factors towards them would produce an absurd Bengaluru or Vancouver executive cell.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The two research bundles reconcile exactly on capacity: 20,630,806 shares were available for future issuance across all shareholder-approved plans at 31 January 2026, of which 2,980,937 sat in the employee stock purchase plan reserve, leaving 17,649,869 under the 2020 Omnibus Plan.
• Simple arithmetic implies about 52 percent of the post-amendment headline authorisation remained and about 48 percent had been consumed, but that is only a rough availability ratio because full-value awards count two-for-one and forfeiture and recycling rules change the reserve.
• 4,906,111 options and rights were outstanding at a weighted-average exercise price of $63.49. That price applies to the legacy option population only and has nothing to do with restricted or performance shares.
• FY2026 stock compensation expense was $139 million, split $119 million time-based, $16 million market-based and $4 million performance-based, which is itself evidence that time-based restricted shares dominate the grant population.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Employee and executive time-based restricted shares generally vest one third on each of the first three anniversaries of grant, subject to continued service and the award agreement. Executive performance shares are a single settlement after a three-year performance period at zero to 150 percent of target. Non-employee director awards vest over about one year with settlement generally deferred until board service ends. Shares bought through the employee stock purchase plan are purchased rather than granted, and the 2012 plan text imposed a one-year holding period on post-April-2011 purchases.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Legal eligibility under the 2020 Omnibus Plan is broad and covers employees, officers, advisers, consultants and non-employee directors, but grants are entirely discretionary. There is no published minimum GL, no guaranteed grant schedule and no statement that any employee population receives a recurring award.
• Public salary samples show zero recurring stock at GL6 and GL7 in the United States, a small component appearing at GL8 and GL9, about $8,000 at a sampled GL10 Senior Manager and nothing at all in the displayed India GL7 to GL10 records. That is observed grant practice, not an eligibility rule.
• No annual restricted or performance grant policy was located for the frontline store, Geek Squad or distribution population. The absence of evidence is recorded as an absence of evidence, not as a confirmed exclusion.
• Material annual equity is only firmly evidenced from the named-executive layer upward, where FY2026 long-term incentive targets ran from $1.60 million to $13.70 million. A proxy example also describes a non-named-executive senior employee receiving both restricted and performance shares, which supports awards extending below the named-executive group without establishing a cutoff.
• Any page claiming that equity starts at a specific grade would overstate the evidence. What the filings establish is discretion, not a threshold.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Richfield

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $85.29 reference price at 25 August 2026 close and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Jason Bonfig's filed chief-executive terms are a $1.25 million base salary, a 190 percent target annual incentive for the chief-executive portion of the year, a $10.125 million FY2028 annual long-term incentive target and a $1.78125 million FY2027 true-up award split 50 percent performance and 50 percent restricted equity. Anne Bramman's filed terms are a $950,000 base salary, a 150 percent FY2027 short-term incentive target, a $3.25 million FY2027 long-term incentive split half performance and half restricted, a $500,000 sign-on cash award, a $1.25 million sign-on restricted-share award and relocation support. Damien Harmon's role was eliminated in July 2025 and the FY2026 proxy disclosed about $1.784 million of severance-related value inside his other-compensation column.

Board compensation framework

FY2026 actual totals for most non-employee directors ran roughly $305,000 to $330,000, while board chair David Kenny was disclosed at about $505,000. Corie Barry received no separate director compensation for board service while serving as chief executive.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What is visible is the executive cycle. The board's Compensation and Human Resources Committee conducts annual goal setting and certification, long-term incentive grants are generally approved in the first fiscal quarter, and the short-term incentive is certified against three disclosed metrics after the year closes. Nothing about that cadence should be extrapolated to the general employee population, and Best Buy explicitly declines to publish a merit matrix.

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 frontline store, Geek Squad and distribution population is deliberately excluded from the band table. Its geographic behaviour is the opposite of the corporate ladder, running at roughly 65 to 73 percent of United States pay in Canada where corporate technology runs at 49 to 68 percent, and it has no counterpart at all in India. Its posted hourly ranges are carried in the key metrics, the career-level section, the variable-pay table and the news commentary instead of being folded into one interpolated city factor.
2. 2The Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer rows are left out of the band table entirely and carried only in the executive section. Both are single global proxy figures that the source bundle applied city multipliers to, which would have forced every location factor towards parity at the top and produced absurd Bengaluru and Vancouver executive cells. The employee ladder therefore tops out at Vice President with a seniority of 9.
3. 3The two bundles use different foreign-exchange snapshots. One uses 25 August 2026 rates of 95.4125 rupees and 1.3835 Canadian dollars to the United States dollar; the other derives 95.7540 and 1.384945 from European Central Bank reference rates published on 24 August 2026. This report standardises on the European Central Bank derivation because it is traceable to a named official publisher, which moves converted figures by about 0.4 percent against the alternative.
4. 4The bundles disagree on the current employee stock purchase plan terms. One presents the historical 15 percent discount to the lower of the beginning and ending price with a $25,000 annual limit; the other establishes that later amendments reduced the discount and removed the lookback and marks current mechanics as not publicly disclosed. This report follows the second and treats the historical terms as plan history.
5. 5The Canadian calibration is the weakest in the report. The public GL8 package reads below GL7, GL10 reads below GL9 in base terms, and the observed ratios against Richfield swing between 49 and 76 percent across adjacent levels. The factors used here are smoothed across that noise rather than reproducing an inversion that is almost certainly a sampling artefact.
6. 6India carries no observation below GL7 or above GL10, so the GL6 and Vice President ends of the Bengaluru curve are extrapolations from a four-point fit. The interpolated GL10 total sits about four percentage points below the directly observed 35 percent ratio, which is the largest single fitting error in the location table.
7. 7United States city factors are flat across the entire ladder because that is how the source bundle constructed them. In reality a metro premium usually compresses at senior levels, so the Seattle and Los Angeles cells at GL11 and above are likely to be overstated relative to Richfield.
8. 8No employer benefit load is added anywhere. Total compensation in this report is base plus target bonus plus annualised equity only, so it is pay rather than employer cost, and it will read below any figure that adds a notional benefits percentage on top.
9. 9Kamy Scarlett's FY2026 stock award is carried at the disclosed $2.5 million long-term incentive target because the source bundles round her Summary Compensation Table stock column; her components sum to the $4.72 million total shown, but the stock line is the rounded figure rather than a cent-exact one.
10. 10The March 2026 award settlements report no transaction price on the Form 4. Their values in the insider table apply the $64.019 price of the associated 23 March sales, which is an analytical valuation rather than a filed number.
11. 11Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Sydney and Mexico City appear in the source bundles as footprint, legal-entity or exited-market notes with no compensation evidence. They are omitted from the location table rather than given fabricated factors, so the report covers 11 markets across three countries.
12. 12The bundles disagree on the FY2024 headcount snapshot, giving both a rounded 85,000 from the 10-K human-capital disclosure and 87,830 from the proxy pay-ratio population. The trend table uses the proxy populations where available because they are constructed on a consistent basis.

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 — 14 sources

The workforce has fallen roughly 8 percent over three years, driven by store and labour optimisation rather than by a single announced reduction. FY2026 restructuring charges of about $190 million covered labour and store optimisation, Best Buy Health optimisation and China sourcing actions, and a $45 million termination-benefit liability remained at 31 January 2026. The one population moving the other way is Bengaluru, which grew from about 350 in mid-2025 towards a stated target of roughly 500 and stood at 430 at the FY2026 measurement date.

Segment revenue and workforce distribution

Best Buy reports two segments, Domestic for the United States and International for Canada, and the International segment represents about 8 percent of company revenue against 11 percent of headcount. India and China are support and sourcing populations inside the corporate structure rather than reportable revenue segments.