How Biogen Pays

Scientific and technical ladder — B1 through B7

Leadership ladder — B8 through B10

Executive and board — B11 through Board

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Biogen's public materials expose titles such as Associate, Scientist, Principal, Manager, Associate Director, Director, Vice President and Executive Vice President, but no source in either bundle discloses a global grade taxonomy, a job-evaluation point scale or internal grade codes.
• The one hierarchy statement Biogen does make is that executives, for compensation discussion, are employees at Vice President and above, and that compensation decision processes generally apply to all employees.
• Job-level labels inside Biogen's applicant tracking system are not a people-management ladder. A current Principal Scientist posting carries a Management job-level tag while remaining an individual contributor role, so title and system label must be read separately.
• Neither bundle found a published grade-harmonization matrix for the Reata, Human Immunology Biosciences, Apellis or RayThera acquisitions. Acquisition-related accelerated vesting appears in the accounting notes, but a legacy-to-Biogen crosswalk is not publicly disclosed.
• The B11 row is the average of four named executive officers and the B12 row is one individual, so both are disclosure summaries rather than bands. The director row is a governance package and is excluded from the range chart.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Cambridge

Biogen discloses only the United States and international headcount split, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by employee count. Baar reports more than 470 employees and Research Triangle Park more than 1,500 manufacturing and technical staff; every other city total is not publicly disclosed.

Cambridge anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Cambridge is the anchor because it has the deepest evidence: current Biogen postings with employer-provided ranges, 55 of the 91 FY2025 labour condition applications and multiple salary-platform samples.
• Research Triangle Park is the largest manufacturing footprint, described in July 2025 as carrying more than 1,500 manufacturing and technical employees plus more than 400 skilled contractors, alongside a further $2 billion investment.
• Baar in Switzerland is the international headquarters and publicly reports more than 470 employees. It is the only non-United States city in this report with a disclosed headcount.
• Bangalore is the Biogen Capability Center India, a captive technology, data, integration, automation, testing and enterprise-systems site. It is not a vendor-style offshore delivery centre, so onsite and offshore rate-card comparisons do not apply.
• Total compensation in Bangalore runs at roughly 16 percent of the Cambridge anchor at the most junior band and about 45 percent at the leadership end, so the gap narrows from about six times at entry to just over two times at director level.
• The B11 and B12 rows are proxy disclosures shown for reference. They are global executive values converted for display and are not a local pay range in any selected city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Outstanding options, restricted stock units and performance share units, counting performance awards at target, totalled 3,961,244 shares at 31 December 2025.
• The weighted-average exercise price shown against outstanding awards was $301.85, but that price applies only to the option component and sits far above the $220.77 share price used for illustration in this report, so those legacy options are deeply underwater.
• Total future issuance capacity across the two active plans was 8,090,967 shares: 5,925,677 under the Omnibus plan and 2,165,290 under the purchase plan.
• Neither bundle publishes a pool utilisation percentage. Reconciling one would require the original authorised share counts, the 1.5-to-1 full-value counting ratio, purchase-plan issuances and forfeiture recycling across four plan ledgers, so the figure is deliberately omitted rather than estimated.
• Acquisition-related accelerated vesting from the Reata and Human Immunology Biosciences transactions inflated share-based compensation charges in earlier years, so the expense trend is not a clean read on the ordinary annual employee grant run-rate.

2025 plan activity and accounting

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Executive restricted stock units generally vest in approximately equal annual installments over three years beginning on the first anniversary, which is a year faster than the four-year schedule common in large-cap technology. Performance share units cliff at the end of the three-year period. Biogen publishes no vesting schedule for ordinary employee grants, and it publishes no grant cadence either, so the schedule above is the executive design and should not be assumed to apply below Vice President.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Biogen's proxy states that all employees are eligible for long-term incentives and that the award form varies by employee level. Current United States postings independently state that regular employees are eligible for both a cash bonus and an equity incentive opportunity.
• It is therefore wrong to say that equity begins at Director or Vice President. What begins around Vice President is the performance share unit component and the executive award architecture, not equity itself.
• The proxy does not say that every employee receives a grant every year, and it discloses no grant value by grade. The B2 to B10 equity values in this report are a modelling bridge, not a Biogen disclosure.
• Interns and co-ops are not treated as standard equity recipients; purchase-plan eligibility depends on employment status and local plan rules.
• Non-employee directors receive an approximately $300,000 annual restricted stock unit award, with roughly $100,000 more for the independent chair, generally vesting at the earlier of the first anniversary or the next annual meeting.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Cambridge

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $220.77 reference price at 25 August 2026 snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

2025 year-end salary rates disclosed in the proxy show differentiated increases at the top: the chief executive at $1.675 million after a 5 percent rise, Susan Alexander at $995,706 after 4 percent, Priya Singhal at $907,500 after 10 percent including a market adjustment, Nicole Murphy at $892,688 after 15 percent including a market adjustment, and Robin Kramer at $750,000 on appointment. Those year-end rates, not the earned salary in the table, are what the 2025 short-term incentive targets were calculated on. They are executive-specific evidence and should not be read as a companywide merit range.

Board compensation framework

2025 totals for the ten non-employee directors were Caroline Dorsa $629,930, William D. Hawkins $462,447, Jesus B. Mantas $459,947, Maria C. Freire $457,447, Eric K. Rowinsky $454,947, Monish Patolawala $447,447 and Susan K. Langer, Lloyd B. Minor, Menelas Pangalos and Stephen A. Sherwin at $439,947 each. Directors are paid predominantly in stock, so roughly two thirds of a standard director package is the annual restricted stock unit award rather than cash.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What is documented is the input, not the outcome. Individual short-term incentive multipliers reflect the overall performance rating, quantitative and qualitative goals, leadership competencies and relative executive performance, and current Biogen postings state that base pay is set analytically using relevant skills and experience, job location and internal equity. That last phrase is unusually explicit for a public posting and is useful evidence of compensation philosophy even where no range is published. Biogen also runs an annual engagement survey with manager action planning.

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 bundles disagree on the B11 executive row. One normalizes a $650,000 to $1,150,000 base range with $3.5 million to $8.0 million of equity; the other reports the actual named-executive outcomes. This report uses the arithmetic mean of the four non-CEO 2025 named executives, which reconciles exactly to $7,271,498 including a $132,310 other column carrying the $898 bonus and the $37,718 pension value change, because that is traceable to the Summary Compensation Table.
2. 2The B12 chief executive row is a single global figure that is identical in every city table. It is kept in the band list for reference but marked chart-excluded, and the employee ladder is capped at B10 so that the city factor interpolation fits the real employee population rather than being dragged toward one worldwide number.
3. 3Both bundles build total compensation as base plus target variable pay plus a notional 12 to 16 percent benefit load plus annualized equity. That load is employer cost, not pay. It has been stripped here and every total rebuilt from its components, so totals in this report sit roughly 8 to 13 percent below the corresponding cells in the source bundles.
4. 4The source model interpolates city factors piecewise, from an entry factor at B1 to a mid factor at B6 and then to a leadership factor at B11. This report can only carry two endpoints and interpolates linearly by seniority, so mid-ladder cells in the low-cost markets, India most of all, run a few points above the bundle's own figures.
5. 5The two bundles use different foreign-exchange snapshots for the same date. This report standardises on the package bundle's European Central Bank rates for 25 August 2026, which differ from the intelligence bundle's in the fourth decimal place; the Argentine peso is a dated market reference rather than a central-bank rate.
6. 6Mumbai and Hyderabad were requested in the original research prompt and modelled in one bundle, but neither bundle verified a significant Biogen employee base in either city. They are omitted from the location table rather than presented as Biogen markets. Zug and Luterbach are omitted for the opposite reason: they share a labour market with Baar and Solothurn respectively and carry identical factors.
7. 7The two bundles disagree on the peer chief executive comparison. One cites Vertex at $21,538,668 for 2024 and the other at about $21.144 million for 2025; this report uses the 2024 figure because it is the one traceable to a named proxy in the source register. Regeneron's 2024 total is unusually low because of its multi-year equity cycle rather than because of a pay decision.
8. 8The B10 vice-president row has no Biogen evidence of any kind. It is an executive-market bridge between the observed director anchors and the disclosed named-executive outcomes, and its $725,000 modelled equity value is the least supported number in the entire band table.
9. 9No company-wide 2025 or 2026 salary hike percentage, pay freeze, across-the-board cut, campus offer revision or delayed-joining programme was located in either bundle. Recent workforce action has been portfolio and integration specific rather than a compensation reset.
10. 10Biogen discloses no geographic revenue split in either bundle, so the news panel carries the headcount trend and disclosed workforce split rather than a regional revenue breakdown.

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 — 13 sources

Biogen does not publish a year-by-year headcount series in either bundle, so the trend above tracks the restructuring programme that shaped the workforce rather than a clean employee count for each year. The only firm figure is the roughly 7,500 employees at the end of 2025, and the only sub-national numbers are more than 470 employees at Baar and more than 1,500 manufacturing and technical employees plus more than 400 contractors across the Wake and Durham county campuses.