How Booking Holdings Pays

Analytical crosswalk — B1 through B4, early and mid career

Analytical crosswalk — B5 through B7, senior and principal

Analytical crosswalk — B8 through B11, leadership

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Booking Holdings is a federation of brands rather than a single employer with one grade architecture. Booking.com and Agoda reveal different ladders, and no authoritative numeric mapping between them was found.
• The B1 to B11 crosswalk is most reliable for software and technical roles, where the public sample is deepest, and progressively less precise for customer service, partner management, marketing and corporate functions.
• The OpenTable acquisition left a legacy equity plan for outstanding awards only; it does not establish a separate current workforce hierarchy.
• Manager, Director, VP, SVP and EVP are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers rather than claiming a numeric band.
• The named-executive tier is deliberately excluded from the band table. It is a single set of worldwide proxy figures, not a local pay range in any selected city, and it is presented in the executive section instead.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Norwalk

Booking Holdings publishes no city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The only public office-scale statements are Agoda's Bangkok office at more than 4,000 people, Booking.com's identification of Amsterdam as its headquarters and largest office, and the 1,000-job Bengaluru Center of Excellence target.

Norwalk anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Norwalk column is the anchor. Its B4 base of $191,610 is a certified Booking.com (USA) Inc. labour condition application for a Software Engineer II, and the $215,000 total is modelled around that wage.
• Amsterdam is the deepest employee sample in the group. Directly observed Booking.com Netherlands packages run EUR 66,100 at E, EUR 91,667 at F, EUR 179,194 at G and EUR 222,849 at H.
• Bangkok is Agoda's headquarters and its largest office at more than 4,000 people, but its pay level is the lowest of any modelled market at about 0.22 of the Norwalk base.
• Bengaluru is a strategic build rather than a low-cost back office: the Center of Excellence carries a $250 million five-year investment and a target of 1,000 jobs by the end of 2026.
• Named executive figures are worldwide proxy disclosures and are deliberately kept out of the band table, so no city factor is ever applied to them.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The ratio of future reserve to future reserve plus outstanding awards was about 64.3 percent at 31 December 2025. That is a capacity measure rather than economic dilution, because the outstanding figure counts performance share units at their maximum share assumption.
• The detail behind the outstanding total was 128,950 unexercised options, 5,492,275 unvested or unissued restricted stock units and 4,296,600 unvested performance share units at maximum performance.
• Unrecognised stock-based compensation was $974 million at the end of the first half of 2026, expected to be recognised over a weighted-average 2.1 years.
• A 25-for-1 forward stock split took effect for trading on 6 April 2026, so every share count and per-share amount above is on a split-adjusted basis and older filings are not directly comparable.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

This schedule is the plan floor rather than an observed employee grant pattern. The 1999 Omnibus Plan requires that time-only awards generally vest over at least three years, with ratable vesting permitted, and that performance awards generally run at least one year. Named executive performance share units run three-year cycles. Booking Holdings publishes no standard employee vesting schedule, and the crowd-sourced observations behind the Amsterdam, India and Thailand anchors report varying patterns.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• No minimum eligible band is publicly disclosed. The plan permits broad eligibility across employees, officers, consultants and directors but guarantees no award to anyone.
• The 2026 proxy states that equity was excluded from median-employee compensation because it was not distributed to all employees. That is the single clearest disclosure on employee equity in the entire source set.
• Public salary observations show stock at some F-level roles and above in the Netherlands, India, the United Kingdom and Thailand, and no stock at all in many junior records, which is consistent with selective rather than universal grants.
• Indicative annual grant values in the bundle run $0 to $5,000 at B2, $0 to $10,000 at B3, $5,000 to $25,000 at B4, $15,000 to $50,000 at B5, $25,000 to $80,000 at B6, $40,000 to $120,000 at B7, $60,000 to $180,000 at B8, $100,000 to $300,000 at B9, $200,000 to $600,000 at B10 and $500,000 to $3.00 million at B11. At the $212.835 post-split reference price a $25,000 grant is roughly 117 shares.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Norwalk

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $212.835 reference price at 25 August 2026, 14:18 UTC, post-split and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The 2025 vesting outcomes show how far realised value can sit from reported grant-date value: Glenn Fogel realised $101.848 million on 514,475 vested units, Peter Millones $28.696 million on 144,950 units, Paulo Pisano $14.400 million on 72,725 units and Ewout Steenbergen $10.717 million on 52,450 units. No option exercises were reported for any named executive officer in 2025.

Board compensation framework

Director compensation is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the band chart. At the $212.835 post-split reference price the approximately $265,000 annual grant is roughly 1,245 shares, so a director's package is dominated by equity in the same way an executive package is.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The executive process is the one part with real visibility. The 2025 annual incentive funded at 1.62 times target on revenue and Compensation EBITDA outcomes, and long-term incentives run as three-year performance share units and restricted stock units with a relative total shareholder return modifier. Nothing equivalent is published for the employee population, and no evidence of a bell curve or forced distribution was found anywhere in the source set.

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 named executive tier is deliberately excluded from the band table. It is a single set of worldwide proxy figures identical in every city, so scaling it by a city factor would produce absurd offshore cells. It is carried in the executive section instead, and the employee ladder stops at B11.
2. 2No level-dependent geographic compression is modelled. The bundle applies one flat multiplier per city across all bands, and its own direct observations are contradictory: Booking.com India records sit close to Amsterdam at mid-level while Agoda India records sit far below, so an interpolated junior-to-senior spread could not be evidenced.
3. 3The B11 row does not reconcile with the bundle's own equity guidance. Scaling the anchor by the published 3.20 base and 5.50 total multipliers leaves about $201,000 of residual equity, while the bundle's indicative annual grant range for the same band is $500,000 to $3.00 million. The multipliers were kept and the discrepancy recorded rather than silently rebuilding the row.
4. 4Total compensation here is base plus target variable pay plus annualised equity only. No employer benefit load is included, so cells for Australia with its 12 percent superannuation guarantee, Brazil with its thirteenth-month salary and the Netherlands with its holiday allowance understate employer cost rather than pay.
5. 5Band medians are reconstructed rather than disclosed. Only the B4 Norwalk base is a certified figure; every other band is the bundle's multiplier applied to it, and the equity component of each band is a residual after base and target variable pay.
6. 6Two headcount figures circulate and both are used here: 24,300 at 31 December 2025 from the Form 10-K, which carries the United States and international split, and approximately 25,550 at 30 June 2026 from the Form 10-Q, which is the more current total.
7. 7Argentina, Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong, Vilnius, Barcelona, Auckland, Mexico City, Melbourne, Boston, Bellevue, Los Angeles, Miami and Cambridge appear in the source bundle but are omitted from this location table, either because the sample was purely modelled with no Booking-specific evidence or because currency volatility made a dollar translation unstable.
8. 8The chief executive's $3.92 million all other compensation line is not broken out in the reviewed material, so it is reported as a single figure without an explanation of its components.

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 — 22 sources

The workforce is overwhelmingly international: about 88 percent of employees sat outside the United States at the end of 2025, which is why a Norwalk-anchored table describes only a small slice of the actual population directly. Growth of more than 3 percent year on year coexists with the Booking.com organisational review and Agoda's customer-support reductions, so headline headcount growth should not be read as an absence of restructuring. Consolidated attrition, voluntary attrition and any annual salary-hike percentage are not publicly disclosed.