How Boeing Pays

Technical and professional ladder — L1 through L6

Management ladder — grades K, L and M

Leadership and executive tiers — Director through EVP

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Boeing postings routinely label professional roles Level 1 through Level 6 and people-leader roles grade K, L or M, and quote a base range for the specific job and city. That is the strongest public evidence in this report.
• The same numeric level carries materially different pay by city, job family, security clearance, programme and bargaining status. An L3 example spans roughly $110,000 to $135,000 in lower-cost markets and $135,000 to $183,000 in Northern Virginia before clearance premiums.
• There is no published bridge from grade M into Director, Vice President, Senior Vice President or Executive Vice President. This report treats those as title tiers rather than claiming a numeric band.
• The technical fellowship overlay names Associate Technical Fellow, Technical Fellow, Senior Technical Fellow, Principal Senior Technical Fellow and Distinguished Senior Technical Fellow. Grade and salary equivalence to the L ladder is not published, so fellows are folded into the L5 and L6 rows here.
• Boeing and McDonnell Douglas combined in 1997, but the reviewed evidence does not establish an active, separately paid legacy grade system or a current harmonisation schedule.
• Approximately 72,000 employees are covered by collective agreements whose wage steps, general increases and progression rules are contractual. Those populations are outside the bands in this report.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Arlington

Boeing does not publish city-level headcount for most sites, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The disclosed regional figures are roughly 7,000 in India, more than 3,000 in the United Kingdom, about 5,000 across Australia and Oceania and more than 2,000 in Canada, with about 1,500 of the Canadian total in Winnipeg. News reporting placed roughly 65,000 employees in Washington state and more than 9,000 in South Carolina in February 2026.

Arlington anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Arlington column is the anchor. Every band median is the midpoint of the national posting band for that level multiplied by the 1.08 headquarters-metro differential the bundles derive from Northern Virginia requisitions.
• Puget Sound sits at 0.97 of the anchor, Long Beach and El Segundo at 1.04, St. Louis and Mesa at 0.85, and Oklahoma City and Wichita at 0.79. Those are city differentials on the same posting evidence, not separate salary schedules.
• India is Boeing's largest workforce outside the United States at roughly 7,000 people, and the Boeing India Engineering and Technology Centre in Bengaluru is its largest facility of that kind outside the country. Crowdsourced Bengaluru records cover L1 through L4 directly; everything above is modelled.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 13 percent of the Arlington anchor at L1 and rises towards 55 percent at the executive vice president tier, because senior Indian roles compete in a global leadership market while entry-level engineering competes in a local one.
• The Gulf columns exceed the anchor at leadership levels. That is a local expatriate-package market model in a tax-free jurisdiction, not a Boeing schedule, and it should be treated as the weakest row in the table.
• Australia, New Zealand and Canada run slightly the other way: their factors are highest at entry level and drift down towards the leadership tiers, because local mid-market pay is comparatively strong and local executive pay is comparatively weak against the United States.
• The chief executive row is deliberately absent from the bands. Boeing's chief executive salary is a single global figure identical in every city table, and carrying it into the ladder would force every location's factor towards parity at the top.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The employee stock purchase plan was authorised for 12 million shares. Employees purchased 336,831 shares during 2025 at an average price of $182.28, against 216,719 shares at an average of $193.52 in 2023.
• Boeing did not state a consolidated pool-utilisation percentage across the purchase plan and the incentive plan award types in the reviewed 2025 extracts, so no utilisation rate is published here.
• The 2025 executive grant mix was 55 percent premium-priced options and 45 percent RSUs. The 2026 mix is 30 percent performance stock units, 20 percent cliff RSUs with a hold and 50 percent ratable RSUs.
• Executive arrangements carry clawback provisions and generally avoid automatic change-in-control vesting.

Employee stock purchase plan

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Boeing's disclosed executive RSU schedule is 33, 33 and 34 percent over three years, not the generic four-year quarter-per-year schedule that third-party salary sites display on its pages. Premium-priced options granted in 2025 vest on a three-year cliff and expire ten years from grant, and they carry no value below a $221.44 strike. The 2026 design adds a two-year holding period on top of the cliff RSU tranche, extending the economic horizon to five years.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• L1 through grade M: the employee stock purchase plan where eligible and where local law permits the plan to operate. No universal recurring grant is evidenced, and crowdsourced United States, India and Australia records at these levels show near-zero annual stock. That is evidence about reported packages rather than proof of categorical ineligibility.
• Director: selective rather than routine. The source bundles model a $0 to $250,000 annual award range and label it low confidence, so the Director band in this report carries a zero recurring grant.
• Vice President: expected for many officers but not a published schedule. The bundles model a $250,000 to $2.0 million annual range, and stock-ownership guidelines start at this tier at one to two times base salary.
• Executive Vice President: disclosed for named executives, with 2025 aggregate grant-date values of $10.0 million for Pope, $6.0 million for West, $5.0 million for Shockey and $4.5 million for Gerry, plus $9.5 million of new-hire replacement equity for Malave.
• Chief Executive: a $17.5 million 2025 long-term incentive target and a six times base salary ownership requirement with a five-year attainment period.
• Non-employee directors: an annual $200,000 stock-unit retainer, generally not distributed until after Board service ends.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Arlington

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $211.08 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

Malave's $20.18 million total is not a steady-state run rate. It contains $8.5 million of non-recurring new-hire cash and $9.5 million of replacement equity against only $399,808 of salary for a partial year, so his ongoing annual target is far lower. Shockey similarly received a one-time new-hire equity award inside his $5.0 million figure. Boeing reviews executive base salaries in February: Gerry received an approximately 7 percent adjustment towards market median in 2025 and West a 4 percent cost-of-living increase, which shows the company does not apply a uniform merit percentage even at officer level.

Board compensation framework

Executive officers employed by Boeing receive no additional compensation for Board service, so Kelly Ortberg's director role is unpaid. The deferred settlement of the stock-unit retainer is the distinguishing feature of the programme: directors accumulate units through their tenure and receive shares only afterwards, which keeps their economic exposure to the share price running through the whole period of their oversight.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Posting language is the only public evidence of career timing. Level 2 requisitions commonly cite two or more years, Level 3 five or more, Level 4 nine or more, and some Level 5 and Level 6 postings cite 14 and 20 years respectively. Movement into the grade K first-line manager population is a separate leadership selection at roughly 8 to 14 years, not an automatic step off the technical ladder, and Boeing publishes no tenure rule for grade K into L or M. The technical fellowship offers a parallel route for people who do not want to manage, but its pay equivalence to Director or Vice President is not public.

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 chief executive row is deliberately absent from the band table. Boeing's chief executive salary is a single global figure of $1,500,000 that both source bundles convert identically into every city column, so carrying it into the ladder would force every location factor towards parity at the top and produce absurd offshore cells. The full package is presented in the executive section instead.
2. 2Union-represented employees are excluded from the bands. Roughly 72,000 people are covered by IAM and SPEEA agreements whose contractual wage steps run on a different logic from the salaried ladder, and neither bundle contains a negotiated wage-scale rate table that could be modelled. Only percentage outcomes are public: 38 percent of nominal general wage increases over the 2024 IAM 751 agreement, a reported 24 percent plus a $6,000 ratification bonus in the 2025 IAM 837 settlement, and the 2026 Wichita SPEEA wage-pool schedule. Those figures appear in the progression and news sections rather than in any band anchor.
3. 3The source bundles compute a planning figure they call CTC as base plus target variable plus an 8 to 14 percent notional employer benefit load plus any equity range. That load is employer cost rather than employee pay, and it has been stripped here: every usTotal is rebuilt as base plus target variable plus annualised equity so the components reconcile.
4. 4The two bundles disagree on the foreign-exchange snapshot. One uses 95.41 rupees to the dollar and the other 95.3594, with similar sub-0.1 percent differences on other crosses. This report uses the first bundle's rates throughout because they are the set the larger bundle's location matrix was built on.
5. 5The two bundles also disagree on peer coverage: the larger one includes Northrop Grumman at $25,357,443 in the chief executive comparison and the smaller one omits it. Both agree on Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and RTX, so Northrop Grumman is retained.
6. 6Director and Vice President anchors have no salary-transparent posting behind them. Boeing posts ranges up to grade M and stops, so those two rows are market models and are labelled as such. The Vice President row is excluded from the range chart because its modelled equity component blows out the scale.
7. 7Equity is recorded as zero for every band from L1 through Director. That reflects an absence of evidence for a routine grant rather than proof of ineligibility: the bundles model a selective $0 to $250,000 range at Director, and occasional recognition or negotiated awards below that are possible but are not a published band entitlement.
8. 8Base and total calibration factors are identical for every market because the source model applies one global target-variable scaffold and no market carries employee equity. Where a company has genuinely different local bonus practice, those two factors would separate; here there is no evidence to separate them.
9. 9No geographic revenue split is presented. Boeing reports revenue by segment rather than by region in the material reviewed for these bundles, so the panel is omitted rather than filled with a segment split relabelled as geography.
10. 10H-1B application counts differ by a factor of five between providers for FY2026, from 13 on a narrow legal-entity filter to 72 on a broad one. Both are reported rather than reconciled, because neither bundle contains the entity-level mapping needed to choose between them.

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 — 20 sources

The 2024 to 2025 increase of roughly 10,000 people ran directly against an announced 10 percent workforce reduction, because gross reductions, redeployment, rehiring and the Spirit AeroSystems acquisition all landed in the same period. Union coverage grew faster than headcount, from about 58,000 to about 72,000, which is a structural change in how much of Boeing's payroll is set by contract rather than by merit review. Boeing publishes no company-wide attrition rate, and the 79 percent of employees who said they were proud to work at Boeing in the 2026 survey, up 12 points, is an engagement measure rather than a turnover one.