How Block Pays

Individual contributor ladder — APM through L8

Engineering management ladder — L5 EM through L8 EM

Leadership and board — VP through Block Head

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The L3 to L8 individual contributor ladder and the L5 to L8 management ladder are genuine Block publications, taken from the public Block Engineering Career Ladder document, not reconstructed from salary sites.
• The pay attached to those levels is not a Block publication. Every non-executive figure here is a Levels.fyi observation or a calibration built on one, and Block publishes no range, minimum, midpoint or maximum for any level.
• The ladder is an engineering document. Design, data, product, risk, sales and corporate functions are mapped onto it by scope in this report, and that mapping is progressively less precise the further a function sits from software engineering.
• No published document connects L8 to Vice President, Senior Vice President or Executive Vice President. Treating the top of the management ladder as a VP tier is an inference, not a disclosure.
• The Lead layer is a proxy disclosure of roles, not a grade. Block Head, Foundational Lead, Ecosystem Lead, Business Lead, Engineering Lead and Counsel Lead are job titles with no numeric level attached.
• The outside director row is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart, as are the Lead and Block Head rows.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Oakland

Block is a distributed-work company and does not publish city-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by employee count. The only geographic disclosure is the country population in the 2026 proxy, which covers 10,197 people and never mentions India.

Oakland anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Oakland column is the anchor and it is Zone A. L3 through L7 medians come from Levels.fyi United States software-engineering records refreshed in August 2026, where base, annualised stock and cash bonus reconcile exactly to the published total at every level.
• Zone factors are the one geographic input Block itself publishes. New York City, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle are Zone A; Austin, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland and Washington DC are Zone B at about 0.95; Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Scottsdale and Salt Lake City are Zone C at about 0.90; Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville and St. Louis are Zone D at about 0.85.
• Australia is the only non-United States market with both verified headcount and usable level-by-level observations: A$110,730 base and A$163,065 total at L4, A$163,008 and A$236,819 at L5, and A$233,126 and A$434,378 at L6, plus an upper total around A$519,000 at L7.
• Canada carries five observed points from L3 through L7, running C$118,002 base and C$139,417 total at L3 up to C$237,792 and C$422,685 at L7 in Toronto. Mexico City carries a single observed L4 point at MX$1,123,335 base and MX$1,800,219 total.
• The Lead and Block Head rows are global proxy disclosures converted for display only. They are not a local pay range in any selected city, and an Australian or Indian cell on those rows should be read as a currency conversion rather than a market benchmark.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 76.2 million figure and the 108.7 million figure in the proxy equity-plan table measure different things. The first is the future-grant reserve under the 2025 Plan specifically; the second is the broader shareholder-approved plan table that also includes the employee stock purchase plan reserve. Subtracting one from the other to derive a utilisation rate would be wrong.
• At the report-date price of $82.72 the remaining 2025 Plan reserve has a mechanical market value of roughly $6.3 billion. That is arithmetic, not a forecast of awards, dilution or expense.
• Stock-based compensation expense was about $1.2 billion in FY2025 against $1.264 billion in FY2024 and $1.276 billion in FY2023, so equity cost is drifting down rather than up even as headcount fell.
• The fair value of shares vested was approximately $1.2 billion in FY2025 and FY2024 against $873 million in FY2023, which is the closest public proxy for what employees actually realised.
• The two source bundles report FY2025 stock-based compensation as $1.215 billion and $1.203 billion respectively. This report uses about $1.2 billion rather than choosing between them.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Four years is the pattern that public market reports show for ordinary Block restricted stock units, but the award agreement controls and Block publishes no standard schedule. The one schedule that is disclosed is the FY2025 executive programme: options vesting one forty-eighth monthly and restricted stock units one sixteenth quarterly, both over four years, which is a smoother monthly and quarterly release rather than a one-year cliff.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Eligibility is the part Block does disclose. The benefits portal states that every employee receives equity, so the question at Block is not whether a level gets stock but how much, and the how much is never published.
• Public market records show an annualised stock component from L3 upward in the United States, rising from about $36,000 at L3 to about $197,000 at L6 and about $316,000 at L7. Those are employee-reported observations, not a Block grant table.
• Refresh cadence, refresh formula, minimum grant thresholds and any performance condition on ordinary employee awards are all absent from the reviewed sources. No formula has been invented here to fill the gap.
• Employee stock purchase plan eligibility is the most concrete rule available: generally 20 or more hours a week and more than five months a year for the Section 423 component, plus administrator-designated employees under the non-423 component, subject to statutory limits.
• Because Block stock is publicly traded, vested shares are liquid subject to trading windows, the insider trading policy, tax withholding and securities law. Tender offers are not the liquidity mechanism here.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Oakland

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $82.72 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

Block uses a Lead vocabulary rather than conventional C-suite titles, so the proxy names a Block Head, a Foundational Lead, an Ecosystem Lead, a Business Lead, an Engineering Lead and a Counsel Lead. The approved FY2025 base rate for most continuing named executives was $600,000; the Summary Compensation Table shows $591,250 where the rate changed during the year and $338,958 for Arnaud Weber, whose year-end annualised base was $600,000. Dhanji Prasanna's Australian-denominated base was converted by Block at 1.50 Australian dollars to the US dollar for proxy disclosure, and his all-other-compensation line includes Australian superannuation rather than a 401(k) match.

Board compensation framework

Actual FY2025 totals ran from $319,999 for James McKelvey to $413,283 for Roelof Botha, with Anthony Eisen at $410,156, Paul Deighton at $356,249, Randall Garutti at $343,749, Neha Narula at $340,840, Mary Meeker at $340,837, Amy Brooks at $326,861 and Shawn Carter at $320,530. The spread is driven entirely by committee service rather than by differentiated equity awards.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What Block does publish is more useful than a rating scale: the career ladder itself carries experience descriptors at every level. L3 is a first full-time role, L4 sits about two years later, L5 about five years in, L6 about eight, L7 about twelve and L8 about fifteen. On the management side, L5 EM is a new people leader often entered from around IC L6 scope, L6 EM expects roughly two years of managing or a successful tech-lead record, L7 EM about four years of managing including managing managers, and L8 EM about eight years across multiple organisations. Annual compensation planning coincides with the feedback cycle and pay-equity analyses are conducted annually.

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 anchor band table. One reports an analyst-normalised BH0 to BH9 hierarchy with an L3 median base of $128,100 and total of $167,700; the other reports the Levels.fyi August 2026 records in which base, stock and bonus reconcile exactly to a $161,543 total. This report uses the second, because a reconciling component breakdown is traceable and a rounded median is not.
2. 2The bands table is built on the published engineering ladder rather than on the normalised BH hierarchy, so the BH0 associate row appears here as APM and the BH7 vice-president row is retained as an explicitly modeled bridge. The Lead, Block Head and outside director rows are marked chart-excluded so that a $13.7 million proxy value and a $2.75 founder salary do not destroy the range chart scale.
3. 3Location factors are applied flat across the ladder and no baseFactorTop or totalFactorTop is set, because both bundles publish a single multiplier per market. The observed Australian points genuinely do compress with level, from about 0.49 of the United States total at L4 to about 0.69 at L6, but extrapolating a three-level sample across L3 to L8 would push the top-of-ladder factor above 1.0, which is why it has not been done.
4. 4The bundles disagree on the vice-president row: a $500,000 base and $2.0 million equity median alongside a $3.0 million total median that does not add up from them. This report rebuilds the row from its components at $2.5 million total and marks it modeled.
5. 5The bundles disagree on FY2025 stock-based compensation, at $1.215 billion and $1.203 billion. This report describes it as about $1.2 billion rather than choosing between the two.
6. 6The bundles disagree on the report-date share price, at $82.72 on 25 August 2026 and $81.38 on 24 August 2026. This report uses $82.72 for consistency with the location factor set and the equity share illustrations.
7. 7The bundles disagree on who made the 15 May 2026 employee stock purchase plan acquisition of 438 shares at $48.46, attributing it to Brian Grassadonia and to Owen Britton Jennings respectively. This report follows the bundle that cites the specific Form 4 filing date.
8. 8One bundle records an Amrita Ahuja open-market sale of 8,971 shares at $85.85 on 5 August 2026, a price inconsistent with the $81.63 and $82.23 lots filed for the same date in the other bundle. That line is omitted here rather than reconciled.
9. 9The executive table combines stock awards and option awards into a single equity column because the shared schema has one field for it. The underlying FY2025 split was roughly even for Ahuja, Grassadonia, Jennings and Prasanna, and entirely restricted stock units for Weber.
10. 10No employer benefit load has been added to any total compensation figure. Superannuation, provident fund, 401(k) match, pension match and the employee stock purchase plan discount are employer cost or employee-funded value, not pay, and every total here is base plus cash bonus plus annualised equity only.
11. 11No manager pay dataset was located at any level of the published management ladder, so the L5 EM through L8 EM rows carry the same-level individual contributor anchors and are marked modeled. The ladder is official; the manager pay attached to it is not.
12. 12Foreign-exchange snapshots differ between the bundles by under half a percent. This report standardises on the more precisely quoted 24 to 25 August 2026 set, which covers every currency used here.
13. 13No company-wide 2026 salary increase percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, campus offer revision or off-cycle correction was located in any source, and the post-restructuring compensation position of retained employees is not disclosed.

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 — 12 sources

This is the single most important caveat in the report. Every ratio built on headcount, including the country mix, the pay ratio population and the equity expense per employee, describes an organisation that no longer exists at that size. Block does not publish city-level headcount at any point, and the final audited post-reduction country split was not public at the report date, so no market in this report can be reweighted to the current shape of the company.