How Broadcom Pays

Technical ladder — ICB1 through ICB8

Management ladder — first-line manager through senior director equivalent

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• ICB1 through ICB7 are labels visible in public salary datasets. ICB8 and every management title beside the ICB numbers are inferred, and Broadcom has never published a grade chart that would confirm either.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for semiconductor and software engineering roles and progressively less precise for sales, operations, manufacturing and corporate functions, where equivalent scope can be graded differently.
• Broadcom is an acquisition-built company. Legacy Avago, Broadcom Corporation, CA Technologies, Symantec enterprise security and VMware populations can carry different titles, vesting histories and refresh cadence inside the same nominal level.
• Vice president, senior vice president and executive vice president are corporate titles rather than a hidden grade number, so this report treats them as title tiers carried in the executive section rather than claiming a numeric band for them.
• The vice-president through chief-executive rows are deliberately excluded from the band table. Broadcom discloses one worldwide figure for each of them, and interpolating a city factor onto a global executive number would produce absurd offshore cells.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus San Jose

Broadcom does not publish city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. San Jose accounts for 62 of the 91 FY2025 visa wage records, but visa concentration is a filing pattern and not a headcount measure.

San Jose anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The San Jose column is the anchor. ICB1 through ICB5 come from Levels.fyi United States software-engineering medians, ICB6 through ICB8 are modelled centres, and the MGR4 to MGR7 rows come from the separate software-engineering-manager sample.
• The public ICB6 software observation reads at $1.639 million total because of stock appreciation in a very small sample. The anchor deliberately uses a $900,000 centre instead rather than treating a sampling artefact as a Broadcom level.
• Bengaluru is the only city with observations across six bands: 1.92 million rupees of base and 4.98 million rupees total at ICB1, 3.58 million and 12.71 million at ICB3, 5.24 million and 27.9 million at ICB4, and a 31.83 million rupee total point at ICB6.
• India base pay runs at roughly 19 percent of the San Jose anchor at ICB1 and rises towards 36 percent at the top of the ladder, while total compensation runs from about 34 percent to about 44 percent, so the multiple against the United States falls from around three times at entry to nearer two times at the senior end.
• Direct observations also exist at Israel ICB3 and ICB4, Ireland ICB4, Canada ICB5, Taiwan ICB4 and ICB5, and Pune ICB4. Those cities are held flat across the ladder because their observed ratios move in both directions and do not evidence a consistent junior-to-senior ramp.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Total awards outstanding across every plan were 229,292,444 shares and total remaining capacity including the purchase plan was 384,875,261 shares, so outstanding is 37.3 percent of outstanding plus remaining.
• That 37.3 percent is a simple research ratio and not a company-disclosed utilisation rate. Cancellations, tax withholding, recycling rules, award types and purchase-plan mechanics all affect the legal capacity number.
• Stockholder-approved awards outstanding were 173,343,418 shares against 55,949,026 outstanding under plans Broadcom stockholders never approved, which is a direct consequence of the VMware acquisition rather than of ordinary grant policy.
• Unrecognised compensation cost of $23.833 billion against a FY2025 expense of $7.568 billion means roughly three years of already-committed equity expense is still to run through the accounts.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Employee restricted stock units commonly run over four years in public reports, either 25 percent yearly with quarterly settlement or 25 percent at the first anniversary followed by roughly 2.08 percent monthly. The individual grant agreement governs. FY2025 broke the pattern: Broadcom granted staggered Two-Year Equity Awards in place of the normal annual employee cycle, with vesting start dates of 15 March 2025 and 15 March 2026, so two overlapping retention periods now run at once and year-on-year grant-value comparisons are unreliable.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Broadcom publishes no minimum eligible band, no standard grant table and no guarantee that any individual employee receives stock. Restricted stock units are visible in public packages from ICB1 upward, but that is an observation about a sample, not a policy.
• Annualized value ranges observed and modelled in the bundle run roughly $15,000 to $45,000 at ICB1, $100,000 to $220,000 at ICB3, $300,000 to $600,000 at ICB5, $650,000 to $1.2 million at ICB7 and $900,000 to $2 million at ICB8.
• Performance share units are concentrated in executive and senior retention programmes and generally settle from 0 to 200 percent of target. They are not the ordinary employee instrument, which is the service-based restricted stock unit.
• Employees hired through the VMware, CA Technologies or Symantec transactions can hold assumed awards, inducement awards and new Broadcom awards side by side, with different vesting histories and different refresh expectations inside the same team.
• At the 26 August 2026 reference price of $356.74 a share, the modelled annual grant bands translate to roughly 42 to 127 shares a year at ICB1, 840 to 1,682 at ICB5 and 2,522 to 5,607 at ICB8. Those share counts move every day and are a reference aid, not a grant commitment.

Indicative annual grant value by band — San Jose

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $356.74 reference price at 25 to 26 August 2026 market snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The modelled leadership envelope runs from $350,000 to $650,000 of base and $2 million to $15 million of total for a division vice president, $600,000 to $900,000 of base and $5 million to $50 million of total for a senior vice president or group president, and $700,000 to $1.2 million of base and $15 million to $60 million of total for an executive vice president or corporate officer. The width is not sloppiness: officer equity at Broadcom arrives in episodic multi-year blocks, so any single year's figure for one individual can sit anywhere inside that range. Charlie Kawwas is the clearest illustration, with $21,750 of FY2025 stock awards against $27.2 million for the Chief Legal Officer in the same year.

Board compensation framework

A fully loaded independent director package sits around $380,000 a year before committee chair work, of which roughly 72 percent is equity. That is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from the range chart.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Equity timing is the one part of progression with real visibility, and in FY2025 it changed. Broadcom granted staggered Two-Year Equity Awards with vesting starts on 15 March 2025 and 15 March 2026 in place of the normal annual employee cycle, so an employee can now hold overlapping unvested blocks from two grant vintages plus, in the VMware population, assumed and inducement awards on top. That structure is a retention mechanism first and a progression signal second.

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 vice-president, senior-vice-president, executive-vice-president and chief-executive rows are deliberately excluded from the band table and carried in the executive section instead. Each is a single worldwide figure, and interpolating a city factor onto it would drive every location's factor toward 1.0 at the top of the ladder and produce absurd offshore cells such as an India-based officer on a United States chief-executive base. The band table therefore spans ICB1 to ICB8 and MGR4 to MGR7 only, which is exactly the population the calibration factors were built from.
2. 2The research bundle published one flat base and total factor per city. This report keeps that flat pair everywhere except India, where six directly observed Bengaluru bands show base pay compressing from about 0.19 of the San Jose anchor at ICB1 to about 0.34 at ICB5. The India ramp is derived from those observations and scaled proportionally onto Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Mumbai from their published flat factors; it is a reading of the observed data rather than a bundle figure.
3. 3The bundle's own city model floors the equity component at a 0.20 factor for low-cost markets, which lifts modelled offshore equity above what the pure total factor would give. This report does not apply that floor: every cell here is the anchor median times the stated factor, so offshore equity values will read lower than the bundle's own tables for Penang, Bucharest and the Indian cities.
4. 4No benefit loading is applied anywhere. Total compensation is base plus target bonus plus annualized equity only, and the $174 million FY2025 401(k) employer contribution, statutory provident fund and superannuation contributions and every insurance premium are employer cost rather than pay, so they are excluded from every band and location cell.
5. 5The observed ICB6 software total of $1,638,900 is not used as the anchor. It rests on a very small sample driven by stock appreciation, and the modelled $900,000 centre is used instead. Anyone benchmarking a specific ICB6 offer should treat the gap between those two figures as the real uncertainty at that level.
6. 6The observed Bengaluru ICB4 total exceeds the observed ICB5 total, and the observed Taipei ICB5 total is four times the Taipei ICB4 total. Both are left visible in the evidence notes rather than smoothed away, and both are reasons the total factors for India and Taiwan carry more uncertainty than their base factors.
7. 7Twenty-five of the fifty-five markets in the research bundle are omitted here, including Chandler, Herndon, Islandia, Boulder, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Yakum, Haifa, Cork, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Barcelona, Bologna, Ditzingen, Paris, Beijing, Shenzhen, Melbourne, Ottawa, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Auckland and Dubai. The bundle itself grades several of them low confidence or partner-led, and none adds a market the retained thirty do not already represent.
8. 8Named-executive bonus attainment is expressed against base salary because the proxy discloses the target as 100 percent of base. Where a target opportunity differed from base in a given year the attainment percentage would shift, and the FY2023 and FY2024 comparisons are research calculations from the proxy rather than disclosed percentages.
9. 9The $356.74 reference share price and the 26 August 2026 foreign-exchange snapshot are single-day research values. Every share-count equivalent and every local-currency conversion in this report moves with them.

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 — 13 sources

The 33,000 headcount is the only workforce number Broadcom publishes, and it is company-wide. There is no city-level breakdown anywhere, so the fact that San Jose carries 62 of 91 visa filings tells you where Broadcom files, not where its people sit. The combination of 57 percent research and development and 4.1 percent voluntary attrition is the single most compensation-relevant pair of numbers in the filings: it explains both the $378,281 median employee and the retention economics behind the overlapping equity grants.