How Brown & Brown Pays

Teammate ladder — B0 through B5

Leadership ladder — B6 through B9

Executive

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Brown & Brown has never published a B0 to B11 or equivalent all-employee grade map, a salary midpoint, a compa-ratio policy or a range-penetration rule. The ladder here is a research taxonomy assembled to make public observations comparable.
• Insurance brokerage is not a linear hierarchy. Producers, specialty brokers and acquisition-company leaders can carry economics and titles that do not map cleanly onto corporate support roles at the same nominal level.
• The Accession acquisition brought Risk Strategies and One80 in with more than 5,000 professionals and legacy compensation arrangements. Public filings do not establish that every title, benefit and incentive design has been harmonized.
• 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 rather than claiming a numeric band.
• The chief executive row is excluded from the band table because it is a single company-wide proxy value that the source deliberately does not location-scale. It is carried in the executive section instead.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Daytona Beach

Brown & Brown discloses global headcount but not a reliable office-by-office count, so this catalogue uses the bundle's qualitative major, significant and regional signals rather than ranking offices by employee number. The source bundle carries 39 markets in total; the 30 shown here drop the Australian and New Zealand comparators and the thinnest secondary cities.

Daytona Beach anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Daytona Beach column is the anchor. B1 through B5 medians are midpoints of ranges built from employee-reported observations of technical assistants, account managers, account executives, business, benefits and risk analysts and software engineers.
• B6 and B7 are the only ordinary-employee bands with an official anchor: a Brown & Brown senior finance director posting at roughly $140,000 to $220,000 base spans the two.
• B8 and B9 are modelled downward from the disclosed executive values rather than upward from observations, because no salary source covers the vice president and regional president layers.
• B10 is a modelled ordinary executive band built around the 2025 named-executive disclosures, whose salaries ran from $720,932 to $1,000,000 and whose reported totals ran from $3.40 million to $3.98 million.
• India is a disclosed operating country but no authoritative Bengaluru or Mumbai office, city headcount or Brown & Brown salary schedule was located, so both Indian cities are benchmark-only markets rather than observed ones.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The $97,442,831 of 2025 grant-date value across 894,980 shares to employees other than executive officers is the strongest available evidence that the plan is not an executive-only scheme. It does not disclose the number of recipients, the grade threshold, the distribution or a typical grant size.
• By comparison the current executive officer group received $9,113,931 across 81,914 shares and non-employee directors received $1,539,580 across 13,948 shares in the same table.
• A stock-plan utilisation or burn rate cannot be inferred from a single dated reserve snapshot, and grants and forfeitures continued after the 31 December 2025 measurement date, so the true ungranted balance after the May 2026 amendment is not publicly disclosed.
• Stock ownership requirements are six times base salary for the chief executive, three times for the chief financial officer, two times for other named executives and one times for non-named-executive Senior Leadership Team members. Hedging and pledging are prohibited under company policy.

Equity plan capacity and 2025 grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The four-year schedule shown is an interface illustration for ordinary selective grants. Brown & Brown has not published a universal four-year schedule for every non-executive award, and the plan's only binding floor is a minimum one-year vesting period with a 5 percent exception bucket. What is official is unusual in the other direction: the 2026 annual named-executive awards use five continuous years of service, longer than the three- or four-year schedules common at comparable public companies, with retirement-sensitive treatment in some cases.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• There is no published recurring non-executive equity grant table by title or grade. Selective grants are plausible from B4 upward and likely from B7 upward, but eligibility thresholds and grant cadence are not public, which is why the modelled grant envelopes here start at zero at every band below the executive layer.
• The modelled selective grant envelopes run $0 to $5,000 at B4, $0 to $15,000 at B5, $0 to $35,000 at B6, $5,000 to $75,000 at B7, $15,000 to $150,000 at B8 and $50,000 to $300,000 at B9. These are planning envelopes built around the aggregate non-executive grant disclosure, not observed awards.
• Purchase-plan access rather than grants is the realistic ownership route for most teammates: the Teammate Stock Purchase Plan in the United States and Save-As-You-Earn in the United Kingdom, with participation reported above 60 percent and 40 percent respectively.
• Named-executive annual awards for 2026 were split 75 percent performance and 25 percent restricted value, which is a materially more performance-weighted mix than anything evidenced below the executive layer.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Daytona Beach

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $73.34 reference price at 25 August 2026, 23:15 UTC and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The 2025 cash columns are not a clean run-rate. Each named executive received a discretionary bonus on top of the formulaic annual incentive, ranging from $400,000 for Chris Walker to $1,000,000 for the chief executive, reflecting Accession-related and other committee-recognised contributions. Stephen Hearn's $720,932 salary and $1,633,911 incentive target are prorated figures reflecting his appointment during the year. The 2026 proxy separately disclosed higher forward targets: the chief executive salary rose to $1.5 million, the cash incentive target to $5.5 million and the annual equity target to $5.0 million, with chief financial officer targets also increased after a market review of the enlarged enterprise.

Board compensation framework

The base non-employee director package is $250,000 a year in cash and stock before any chair or lead-director retainer. Directors receive their stock through the same 2019 Stock Incentive Plan reserve that funds employee awards, so director grants consume plan capacity alongside teammate grants.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The only official cadence is executive. The Compensation Committee reviews salary, annual cash incentive and long-term equity targets annually, corporate metrics are set at the start of the year and certified after year-end, and personal objectives are assessed separately. Annual and special awards can carry service, performance, retirement, misconduct, non-solicitation and clawback conditions, and Section 16 incentive compensation is subject to mandatory recovery after a specified financial restatement covering the preceding three completed fiscal years.

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 excluded from the band table. The source carries B11 as a single company-wide 2025 proxy total of $8,641,088 that it does not location-scale, so folding it into a ladder driven by flat city factors would have produced a nonsensical Bengaluru or Manchester chief executive cell. It is carried in the executive section, in the leadership hierarchy and in the key metrics instead, and the band table therefore runs B0 through B10.
2. 2The band table's usTotal is rebuilt from base plus modelled variable plus the modelled or official equity midpoint, so the components reconcile exactly. No employer benefit load, payroll tax or notional total-reward uplift is included anywhere in this report.
3. 3The B10 row is a modelled ordinary executive band around the disclosed named-executive values, not a disclosed range, and it is excluded from the range chart because its scale would compress every employee band into illegibility.
4. 4The source bundle contains 39 markets and this report carries 30. The Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland rows were removed because Australia is absent from the latest reviewed operating-country list and no New Zealand footprint was verified; Leeds, Bristol, Glasgow, Brussels, Milan and Kuala Lumpur were dropped as the thinnest secondary cities rather than because their evidence conflicted.
5. 5The Bengaluru and Mumbai rows are country-confirmed but city-unverified. India appears in the operating-country disclosure while no city office, headcount or company salary schedule was found, so those two columns are benchmarks rather than observations.
6. 6A single director Form 4 from 9 June 2026 conflicts with itself: the transaction table shows code P with an acquisition into a revocable trust while the footnote says sold. The row is recorded as a purchase with the conflict preserved rather than resolved.
7. 7No H-1B approval rate is computed. One certified FY2024 labour condition application and one reported 2025 USCIS I-129 approval come from different measurement regimes and cannot be divided into each other.
8. 8No company-wide 2026 ordinary-employee salary increase percentage, freeze or reduction was found in any reviewed source, so none is stated in either direction.

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 — 19 sources

Year-end headcount rose materially because of an acquisition, not because of organic hiring, and acquisition-driven growth combined with segment reclassification and integration restructuring cannot be converted into a voluntary attrition rate. Brown & Brown did not disclose a reliable global voluntary or involuntary attrition split in any reviewed source, and no city-level or office-level headcount is published either, so the market table uses qualitative presence signals rather than employee counts.