How Cardinal Health Pays

Operations ladder — CH-0 and CH-1

Professional ladder — CH-2 through CH-6

Leadership ladder — CH-7 through CH-9

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Cardinal Health job postings expose a levelled architecture through titles such as Advisor, Consultant, Engineer, Senior Engineer, Manager and Director and a standard "What is expected of you and others at this level" section, but the underlying grade numbers or letters have never been published in any filing or career page.
• The crosswalk is most reliable between CH-4 and CH-7, where Cardinal Health publishes salary ranges on individual postings, and least reliable at CH-1, CH-6 and CH-9, which are analyst bridges between observed anchors.
• A senior engineer and a manager can share a pay range while sitting on different career tracks, so title is not a reliable proxy for level anywhere on this ladder.
• Vice president, senior vice president and the named-executive titles are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats them as title tiers rather than claiming a band code for them.
• The clinical and provider population created by the Specialty Alliance managed-services platform is not on this ladder at all. Provider compensation is practice, specialty and transaction specific, and the FY2026 Form 10-K counts 2,700 healthcare providers separately from the 61,200 other employees.
• The named-executive and chief-executive tiers are deliberately excluded from the band table. They are single worldwide proxy figures, and multiplying them by a city factor would produce a nonsensical local range in every market outside the United States.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Dublin, Ohio

This catalogue does not rank offices by employee count, because Cardinal Health discloses none. Site roles are taken from the company's own regional careers pages: Dublin, Ohio is the global headquarters, Dublin and Tullamore in Ireland form the EMEA headquarters, Singapore carries the global procurement headquarters alongside APAC commercial and research work, Kulim and Rayong are the large Asian manufacturing sites, and Mexico and the Dominican Republic host Latin American manufacturing.

Dublin, Ohio anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Dublin, Ohio column is the anchor. CH-4, CH-5 and CH-7 come straight from current Cardinal Health postings with published low and high salary ranges; CH-8 comes from an 18-submission Glassdoor vice president sample; CH-0, CH-2 and CH-3 come from multi-submission third-party salary records.
• The CH-8 vice president row is the one place where a published target and an observed outcome disagree. The research bundle's variable-pay ladder puts the vice president target at 25 to 50 percent of base, but the Glassdoor sample's bonus component is about 19 percent of base. This report uses the observed 19 percent so that base, bonus and stock reconcile to the observed $344,500 total.
• Bengaluru is calibrated at 0.18 times the Dublin base. That factor is flat across the ladder in the research bundle, so this report does not interpolate a level-dependent India factor; the underlying India observations run from about 5.2 lakh rupees for an analyst to 39.6 lakh for a senior engineer.
• Cardinal Health publishes no city-level headcount anywhere. The only geographic figures in the filings are the 63,900 total and the 18,100 international count, plus Cardinal Health Canada's statement that it employs more than 800 people nationwide.
• Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune appear in the footprint because the research brief requested them. A significant direct Cardinal Health employee presence in each was not independently established, and they are labelled as market coverage rather than confirmed offices.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 2.5-for-1 charge on full-value awards is the single most important number in the plan and the one most often misread. A 16 million plan-share balance funds about 7 million actual restricted share unit or performance share unit shares, not 16 million.
• Total Cardinal Health share-based compensation has been remarkably flat: $121 million in FY2024, $121 million in FY2025 and $122 million in FY2026, against revenue that grew to $254.2 billion. Equity is a small line for this company relative to a technology employer of comparable revenue.
• Specialty Alliance unit expense of $245 million in FY2026 is twice the entire Cardinal Health share-based compensation line. The provider-platform equity programme is now the larger equity cost, and it reaches a population that is not on the employee ladder.
• At the 25 August 2026 close of $237.92 a share, $50,000 of value is about 210 shares, $100,000 about 420 shares, $3.1 million about 13,030 shares and $13.0 million about 54,640 shares. These are spot-price equivalents and not the grant-date share calculations actually used.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Restricted share units generally vest in three equal annual instalments, so a Cardinal Health grant is fully vested a year earlier than a typical four-year technology grant. Dividend equivalents are paid at vesting rather than accrued to a separate account. Performance share units are a single three-year cliff on committee certification, which is why the August 2026 filings show 187,965 performance share units settling for the chief executive in one event against 48,021 restricted share units.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• No routine equity grant is publicly demonstrated anywhere between CH-0 and CH-5. Spot, retention or acquisition-integration grants may exist, but no public standard does, and the plan explicitly allows additional awards for hiring, promotion, acquisition and retention.
• CH-6 is the level at which eligibility becomes plausible and still unproven. The principal and senior manager threshold is not published in any filing or posting.
• The first solid evidence of employee equity is the Glassdoor vice president sample, which reports a stock component of roughly $36,000 to $67,000. Everything below that is inference.
• Named-executive equity is fully disclosed and is 60 percent performance share units and 40 percent restricted share units, with FY2025 target long-term incentive of $13.0 million for the chief executive and $3.1 million to $3.85 million for the other named executives.
• Annual equity grants are normally made in August. That single fact is the most useful piece of equity timing information Cardinal Health publishes, because it means vesting, new grants and the resulting insider liquidity all cluster in the same month.
• India equity eligibility is not publicly disclosed at all. The Levels.fyi India software engineering record shows no stock component, which is consistent with but not proof of a capability centre that runs cash-only packages below senior levels.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Dublin / Columbus

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $237.92 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

The two segment chief executives are paid on segment scorecards rather than the corporate one, which is why Stephen Mason was the only FY2025 named executive paid below target at 80 percent while the corporate scorecard paid 136 percent. Deborah Weitzman's Pharmaceutical and Specialty Solutions scorecard paid 130 percent. Named-executive base salary changes were effective 26 August 2024, and annual equity grants are normally made in August, so the executive pay calendar and the company-wide equity calendar are the same calendar.

Board compensation framework

An ordinary non-management director package is therefore about $335,000 a year and a non-executive chair about $585,000, before committee chair retainers. The board is paid roughly 60 percent in equity, a higher equity share than any employee band below vice president.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What Cardinal Health does publish is a calendar. Named-executive base salary changes were effective 26 August 2024 and annual equity grants are normally made in August, which makes August the company's compensation month. The plan separately allows additional equity for hiring, promotion, acquisition integration and retention, which is a different thing from a mid-year salary correction and should not be read as one. Job postings state level expectations, years-of-experience preferences, decision scope, project impact and people-leadership scope, so the qualitative ladder is visible even though the pay ladder is not.

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. 1Only one research bundle exists for Cardinal Health, so this report has no second source to cross-check against. Where a figure could not be corroborated, it is labelled by evidence class rather than presented as agreed.
2. 2The research bundle's United States total compensation column added a benefits and bonus allowance on top of base, bonus and equity. That employer benefit load has been stripped here and every total rebuilt from its components, so the totals in this report are lower than the bundle's for CH-0 through CH-7 and reconcile exactly to base plus bonus plus equity.
3. 3The CH-10 named-executive cohort and the CH-11 chief executive tier are deliberately excluded from the band table and carried in the executive section only. They are single worldwide proxy figures, and applying a market factor to them would price an India or Mexico executive on a United States chief executive base. Their incentive design is still shown in the variable pay and equity sections.
4. 4The research bundle floored the senior vice president row at 0.75 in every market so that a country officer would not be priced at a manufacturing multiplier. This report applies the flat market factor throughout instead, so the CH-9 cells in low-cost markets are an unfloored model and will understate a genuine country-officer package.
5. 5The market factors are calibrated on professional roles. The CH-0 and CH-1 operations rows are carried at the same factor, which is defensible in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia and materially less so in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Malaysia and Thailand, where frontline manufacturing pay does not track professional pay. Those two rows in those four markets should be treated as the weakest cells in the table.
6. 6Base and total carry the same factor everywhere because the bundle publishes one multiplier per city rather than separate base and total calibrations. Level-dependent geographic compression is therefore not modelled, and the India cells will understate senior packages if Cardinal Health's India ladder compresses toward the anchor the way technology-company ladders usually do.
7. 7MyVisaJobs and H1BGrader report 128 and 39 FY2026 labour condition applications respectively. Both are shown; neither is averaged and neither is preferred.
8. 8Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune are included at the research brief's request. A significant direct Cardinal Health employee footprint in each was not independently established, and they are labelled as market coverage rather than confirmed offices.
9. 9Cardinal Health discloses no geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so this report omits the regional revenue panel entirely rather than substituting a segment split for one.
10. 10Company-wide attrition is not disclosed in the FY2026, FY2025 or FY2024 Form 10-K, so no retention metric appears in this report.
11. 11The FY2026 proxy statement had not been filed as of the report date. All executive compensation here is FY2025 and will be superseded when the FY2026 proxy appears.
12. 12No verified company-wide salary hike percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, campus offer revision or delayed joining programme was located in any source. The May 2025 tariff-mitigation layoffs reported in trade press are local restructuring and are not evidence of a company-wide pay action.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-24

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 — 16 sources

Two years of double-digit growth without a disclosed attrition rate makes it impossible to separate net hiring from churn replacement. The FY2026 composition disclosure is the more useful figure: 37,000 in distribution, manufacturing, pharmacy and non-provider managed-services roles, 24,200 in functions such as finance, IT, human resources and sales, and 2,700 healthcare providers. The provider population is new enough that it is changing the company's median pay mix rather than its professional pay levels.