How Carvana Pays

Operations ladder — frontline through site leadership

Corporate and technology ladder — B3 through B7

Leadership and executive

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• B1 to B10 is a research taxonomy built for this report. Carvana's actual human resources information system levels, salary structures and compa-ratios have never been published and should not be inferred from these labels.
• Carvana acquired ADESA's United States physical auction business in 2022. No public disclosure describes a legacy ADESA grade catalogue, a conversion table or a harmonisation status, so roles advertised under the ADESA banner should keep that source-entity label rather than being assumed equivalent to a Carvana band.
• The proxy reports roughly 11,832 employees legally eligible under the 2026 Omnibus Incentive Plan against more than 23,100 in the 10-K. The filings never reconcile the difference, so no conclusion should be drawn about which populations sit inside the equity-eligible half.
• Two populations share this table. The operations rows are priced from posted hourly and weekly rates that Carvana itself publishes, while the corporate and technology rows are priced from employee-reported records that Carvana has never confirmed. They are different evidence classes, not different rungs of one ladder.
• B8 and B9 are explicitly modelled bridges between the highest observed employee record and the proxy-disclosed executive layer. They exist so the chart does not jump from $245,000 to $8.35 million, and they should not be used in a pay decision without current offer data.
• Experience ranges are market heuristics used to order the rows. Carvana discloses no time-in-band rule, no promotion gate and no promotion increase percentage anywhere.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Tempe

Carvana does not publish site-level headcount, so this catalogue lists verified operating markets by function rather than ranking them by employee count. The non-United States entries that appear in the source bundle's schema are marked unavailable there and are omitted here rather than being populated with invented pay ranges.

Tempe anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Tempe, Arizona is the anchor. It is the verified headquarters, it carries the corporate, technology and finance population, and it dominates the historical visa sample at 151 records against single-digit counts almost everywhere else.
• Every other United States market in the table carries the same numbers as Tempe. That is not a modelling shortcut: Carvana publishes no location differential, no cost-of-living factor and no band-by-city grid, and the city-level samples that exist are too small to build one.
• The historical labour condition application medians do vary by city, from $100,000 in Atlanta and $105,000 in Scottsdale to $180,000 in Dallas and $182,500 in San Jose. Those samples run from two to seven records and cover sponsored professional roles only, so they are reported separately rather than used as multipliers.
• Inspection and reconditioning centres in Winder, Delanco and Blue Mound and the market and logistics hubs are the physical spine of the operations ladder, but Carvana publishes no headcount, wage table or shift premium for any individual site.
• The Indian rupee figures carried in the source bundle at 95.4125 rupees to the dollar are arithmetic translations of United States pay for reference only. They are not an India salary schedule and there is no India workforce to apply them to.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Fully diluted overhang was 11 percent at 31 December 2025, and the three-year average gross burn rate was 5 percent, made up of 12 percent in 2023, 2 percent in 2024 and 0.3 percent in 2025.
• Restricted stock units granted collapsed from 10.392 million pre-split shares in 2023 to 1.984 million in 2024 and 0.423 million in 2025, while the weighted-average grant-date value per unit rose from $13.13 to $48.00 to $250.22. Fewer, far more valuable units is the pattern, and it is an observation rather than a stated policy.
• 3.591 million nonvested pre-split restricted shares and units were outstanding at the end of 2025 at a weighted value of $50.79, alongside 3.032 million options at a $35.78 weighted exercise price, of which 1.630 million were vested and exercisable.
• The proxy counts roughly 11,832 employees as legally eligible under the 2026 Plan at the committee's discretion against more than 23,100 total employees in the 10-K. The filings do not reconcile the two figures and no population explanation should be inferred from the gap.
• Non-employee director awards are capped at $750,000 a year of cash plus grant-date fair value, subject to the plan's stated exclusions.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The named-executive schedule is precise and unusual: 25 percent cliffs on the 1 April following grant, then the remaining 75 percent in 36 equal monthly instalments rather than quarterly. FY2025 awards began vesting on 1 April 2026 and the August 2026 grants begin on 1 April 2027. Equity granted under the 2017 Plan more generally vests over four years, and the legacy Carvana Group LLC awards typically ran four to five years. Carvana publishes no vesting schedule for ordinary employees at all.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The employee stock purchase plan is the only equity component documented as broadly available. It excludes senior management and requires the employee to fund it from payroll, so it is a purchase right rather than a grant.
• Broad plan eligibility is not the same as a recurring grant. No public source establishes a routine restricted stock unit award for frontline operations, logistics or reconditioning roles, and the report shows zero equity for those bands rather than inventing a value.
• Annualised stock does appear in employee-reported corporate and technology packages, at roughly $3,875 at Engineer I, $10,922 at Engineer II, $16,722 at Senior Engineer I and $30,857 at Senior Engineer II. Those are market observations of what people say they received, not a Carvana grant table.
• An Associate Director, ADESA West posting explicitly references equity eligibility while stating no amount or frequency, which is the only public evidence that equity reaches the senior professional layer at all.
• Every pre-May-2026 share count must be multiplied by five before comparison with a current count. Dollar grant-date fair values are unaffected by the split.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Tempe

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $75.77 reference price at 25 August 2026, post 5-for-1 split and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The four executives below the chief executive are paid within a narrow band of each other. Jenkins and Huston received identical $954,435 salaries and identical $7,378,767 stock awards, Gill sat at $825,000 and $6,602,762, and Taira at $838,184 with the smallest grant at $4,458,662. All other compensation is small for everyone except Gill at $51,837, and the FY2025 grant terms were identical across the group: a 25 percent cliff on 1 April 2026 followed by 36 monthly instalments. The August 2026 grants repeat the pattern one year forward.

Board compensation framework

Reported 2025 director totals ranged from $326,775 for Dan Quayle to $374,087 for Michael Maroone, with Ira Platt at $359,940, Gregory Sullivan at $366,790 and Neha Parikh at $345,793. A non-employee director therefore earns roughly eight times the $43,236 median Carvana employee for part-time service, which is a useful reference point when reading the 194:1 chief executive ratio.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Salary setting is described narratively rather than formulaically. The proxy names role scope, individual performance, experience, company performance, shareholder return, expected future contribution and market practice as inputs, and explicitly gives them no fixed weighting. The clearest published progression mechanism sits at the bottom of the ladder rather than the top: a Market Customer Advocate posting raises pay by $0.50 an hour every 90 days through the first year, which compounds to roughly $2 an hour, or about 9 percent on a $22 starting rate, before any review takes place.

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. 1Two populations share one band table. Frontline operations, drivers and site leadership sit alongside a corporate and technology ladder, which is normally a modelling error because hourly and professional pay move in opposite directions across markets. It is safe here only because every location factor is 1.0: Carvana publishes no city differential, so no interpolation is applied and neither population is distorted by the other. Any future version that introduces real city factors must split these into separate tables.
2. 2The B9 and B10 rows are excluded from the range chart. B10 is the median of five filed executive rows rather than a band anyone can be placed inside, and B9 is a very low confidence modelled bridge; leaving either in the chart would flatten the entire employee ladder against an $8.35 million top.
3. 3No employer benefit load is added anywhere. Total compensation is base plus target bonus plus annualised equity only, so the 401(k) match worth up to 2.4 percent of pay, medical cover and the stock purchase plan discount sit outside the totals. They are employer cost, not pay.
4. 4The B7, B8 and B9 component splits are modelled. The source bundle discloses only a total for these rows, so the division between bonus and equity is an assumption made to keep the components reconciling with the total, and it should not be read as evidence that a bonus exists at those levels.
5. 5The Associate General Manager row shows total equal to base because the posting discloses no bonus or equity. Comparable site leadership roles in the industry usually carry an incentive, so this row is more likely understated than overstated.
6. 6Provider disagreement on H-1B volume and median is left visible rather than resolved. Counts range from 11 to 61 and medians from $126,346 to $156,000 depending on the filing stage, fiscal-year label and entity match, and no single figure is presented as correct.
7. 7The insider table mixes two kinds of record. The 2026 rows are individual Form 4 transactions with real dates; the 2025 rows are full-year aggregates from the proxy's option exercises and stock vested table, dated to the fiscal year end rather than to a transaction day.
8. 8The source bundle is a single research package rather than two or three, so no cross-bundle reconciliation was possible. Where the bundle's own narrative and its structured data differed, the narrative report was preferred because it carries the filing citation.
9. 9Non-United States entries carried in the source bundle's schema for India, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are marked unavailable there and are omitted here entirely, along with the foreign-exchange rates that would only be used to populate them.

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 — 23 sources

Headcount fell 35 percent between 2021 and 2023 and then grew 69 percent over the following two years, which is a far more violent cycle than the pay data alone suggests. The median employee figure moved much less: $39,465 in 2022, $41,693 in 2023, $47,111 in 2024 and $43,236 in 2025. The 2024 peak and the 2025 fall track the mix of hourly and salaried hiring rather than any pay action, and Carvana publishes no attrition series to separate the two.