How Booz Allen Hamilton Pays

Consulting ladder — Consultant through Vice President

Technical ladder — Engineer through Chief Engineer

Executive — proxy-disclosed officers

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Booz Allen has never published a numeric grade dictionary, an employee salary midpoint table, a bonus target schedule, an appraisal matrix or an equity grant schedule by band. Every non-executive figure in this report is a third-party observation or a calibrated model around one.
• Advertised base ranges are unusually wide because a single requisition can cover several United States markets, experience levels, clearance tiers and contract labour categories. A posting maximum such as the $292,000 on an AI Engineer, Lead requisition is not a normal offer.
• Approximately 77 percent of employees reportedly hold security clearances. Clearance is a stronger determinant of an individual package than the title is, and it segments the market in a way no title crosswalk captures.
• The consulting and technical ladders are separate progressions, not two names for the same rungs. Mapping a Lead Associate to a Lead Engineer by seniority alone will misstate both, because the technical ladder pays ahead of the consulting ladder through the middle of the range.
• Principal, Senior Vice President and the non-named Executive Vice President population are real titles with no usable public pay data. They are described in the hierarchy but deliberately not given band numbers.
• The 2023 Equity Incentive Plan replaced the legacy Third Amended and Restated plan for new grants, and no public post-acquisition salary-band harmonisation table exists, so acquired-team titles cannot be mapped precisely.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus McLean

Booz Allen does not publish city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. The National Capital Region is clearly the largest concentration, but a ranked city list would be inference rather than disclosure.

McLean anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The McLean column is the anchor. Consulting and technical medians come from Levels.fyi United States records, the posting envelopes come from live Booz Allen requisitions in McLean and Washington, and the executive rows come from the FY2026 proxy.
• Booz Allen discloses no city-level headcount and no city-level salary differentiation, so every United States market in this table carries the anchor factor of 1.00. That is what the sources support, not a claim that pay is identical in Huntsville and McLean.
• Labour condition applications are the only true city-level wage evidence and they do disperse: Bethesda records run $130,691 to $208,884, Washington $157,848, San Antonio $151,000, Falls Church $192,194 and Atlanta $97,850 to $122,277. They are base only, cover different roles, and are too few to build city factors from.
• Australian mission postings are quoted in United States dollars and overlap the United States envelope, so Canberra and Adelaide sit at 1.00. The RF Analyst posting at $61,900 to $141,000 and the Mission Support System Integrator posting at $77,500 to $176,000 straddle their United States counterparts.
• Sydney carries 0.74 because the only Sydney evidence is sparse Glassdoor commercial consulting data, an Associate at A$95,000 to A$150,000 and a Senior Consultant at A$91,000 to A$99,000, against the McLean anchors for the same titles.
• London carries a flat 0.88, blended from an Associate at £68,000 to £101,000 running at about 96 percent of the McLean Associate anchor and a Senior Associate at £93,000 to £135,000 running at about 80 percent of the McLean Senior Associate anchor.
• Germany at 518 employees, Japan at 190, Korea at 53, Italy at 34, Pakistan at 30, Singapore at 6 and the remaining enumerated jurisdictions have no public salary evidence of any kind and are deliberately absent from this table rather than shown at an invented factor.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Plan utilisation cannot be reduced to grants divided by an initial pool, because forfeitures and certain surrendered shares recycle under the plan rules. The authoritative point-in-time metric is the 4.3 million shares remaining at 31 March 2026.
• Employee stock purchase plan utilisation is far cleaner: 4.4 million of 10.0 million authorised shares, or 44 percent, had been purchased since inception, leaving 5.6 million of headroom.
• Unrecognised stock compensation cost was $47 million at 31 March 2026 with a weighted-average amortisation period of about 2.0 years, which is small relative to a company of this size and reflects how narrow the grant population is.
• FY2026 stock-based compensation expense of $69 million was down sharply from $94 million in FY2025 and $95 million in FY2024, tracking both the headcount reduction and the forfeiture of the departing chief financial officer's July 2025 grants.

Equity plan capacity and FY2026 grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Named-executive time-vested restricted stock units vest in three equal annual instalments, which is the schedule shown here. Performance restricted stock units are a single three-year outcome settled after the committee certifies the result rather than a graded schedule. Options, where granted, vest in five equal annual instalments over a ten-year term. Director restricted stock uses a two-part schedule vesting half on 31 January and half on 31 July. No vesting schedule is published for ordinary employees because no routine employee grant is evidenced.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The employee stock purchase plan is the only equity route with confirmed broad eligibility, and it is a purchase rather than a grant. An employee who cannot fund payroll deductions receives nothing from it.
• Booz Allen publishes no minimum equity-eligible level, no standard grant table below the named-executive tier and no guarantee that any employee receives a grant. Discretionary awards at Senior Associate and Principal are plausible but unquantified.
• Employee-submitted packages that do show stock show very little of it: about $5,000 of annualised value at Senior Associate and Chief Engineer and about $2,000 at Senior Lead Engineer.
• Continuing non-chief-executive named executives received $1.229 million to $2.049 million of annual stock-award value in FY2026, and the chief executive $10.248 million. Non-employee directors receive $225,000 a year.
• Stock ownership requirements apply at the top: seven times salary for the chief executive and four times salary for the other named executives.

Indicative annual grant value by band — McLean

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $73.83 reference price at 25 August 2026 and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Troy Lahr's ongoing disclosed package is $825,000 of base, an $825,000 target annual incentive and $2.0 million of target annual equity, roughly $3.65 million of target direct compensation before any sign-on or replacement awards and before benefits. Matthew Calderone's FY2026 total of $3,137,301 includes July 2025 grants that were subsequently forfeited on his retirement, so his reported figure overstates what he will realise. Andrea Inserra is the only FY2026 named executive to receive an option award, valued at $250,021 and carried inside the equity column here.

Board compensation framework

A non-employee director receiving no committee chair role is at roughly $345,000 a year in combined stock and cash. The August 2026 grants differ in size between directors, from 3,058 shares for William Thornberry and Ellen Jewett to 5,028 for Michele Flournoy, because some directors elect to take cash retainers in stock. The employee chairman receives no director pay.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

A 2018 i4cp case study described the historical SnapShot approach as a move away from a single annual written review towards more frequent feedback, including monthly conversations during rollout. That is historical context and is not evidence of the 2026 process. What is disclosed is the executive cycle: the Compensation, Culture and People Committee reviews executive pay annually, with grants and proxy disclosure around the fiscal year and annual meeting, and the fiscal year ends 31 March. None of that establishes the employee cycle.

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. 1Principal is a real and consistently observable title with no defensible public pay figure at all, so it is deliberately absent from the band table and carried in the hierarchy notes instead. Senior Vice President is treated the same way. Omitting them keeps the ladder honest but leaves a visible gap between the $267,000 Vice President row and the $2.8 million Executive Vice President row.
2. 2The Vice President row is the weakest number in this report. It is the midpoint of a low-confidence Glassdoor total-compensation envelope of $200,000 to $333,395, rounded to $267,000, with no base and bonus split and no company disclosure behind it.
3. 3Associate, Staff Engineer and Lead Engineer have a published total-compensation median and no published base and bonus split, so the entire median is carried in the base column for those rows. Their bonus and equity columns are structural zeros, not evidence that no bonus is paid.
4. 4The executive rows are proxy disclosures for named individuals rather than population ranges. They are marked chartExcluded so the range chart stays readable, and because they are global figures they are not treated as a local pay range in any city. No baseFactorTop or totalFactorTop is used anywhere in this report, so no executive figure drives an offshore cell.
5. 5London is the only market where the evidence points to level-dependent compression and it points the wrong way, running at about 0.96 of the McLean anchor at Associate and about 0.80 at Senior Associate. Two sparse points cannot support an interpolation curve, so a flat 0.88 is used and the underlying observations are recorded here.
6. 6Every United States market carries a factor of 1.00 because Booz Allen discloses no city-level salary differentiation. Labour condition applications show real dispersion between Atlanta at $97,850 to $122,277 and Bethesda at $130,691 to $208,884, but they cover different roles and are too few to build factors from, so the flat factor is a disclosure limit rather than a claim of geographic parity.
7. 7Germany at 518 employees is the largest non-United States market and has no public pay evidence whatsoever, so it does not appear in the location table. The same applies to Japan, Korea, Italy, Pakistan, Belgium, Singapore and the remaining enumerated jurisdictions. Their headcounts are carried in the metrics and notes instead.
8. 8Total compensation here is base plus bonus plus annualised equity with no notional employer benefit load added, so the totals are pay rather than employer cost and reconcile against their own components.
9. 9The Ellis and H1BGrader visa extracts disagree materially, with a calendar-2026 median of $146,730 against a FY2026 median of $192,194 for the same small employer. Both are shown rather than merged, because the fiscal windows and the treatment of withdrawn filings differ.
10. 10The FY2026 proxy pay-ratio population of 32,085 does not match the rounded 10-K headcount of about 31,500 because the measurement date and methodology differ. Both figures are used in this report for the purposes they were published for.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-26

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

Total headcount fell 13.7 percent across the five quarters shown. Booz Allen does not publish an attrition rate and does not separate voluntary departures from the reduction, so this trend should not be labelled attrition. Customer staff, the billable population, held at about 91 percent of the total throughout, which means the contraction was not concentrated in overhead.