How Casey's General Stores Pays

Store and field ladder — S1 through S6

Corporate ladder — C1 through C4

Management ladder — M1 and M2

Executive ladder — M3 and M4

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The S, C and M codes in this report are research constructs. Casey's has never published numbered bands, salary grades, midpoints or a job-architecture chart, and quoting one of these codes back in a negotiation would be quoting this report rather than Casey's.
• The store pathway is the one progression Casey's does publish: Team Member, then Kitchen Shift Leader or Center Store Leader, then Kitchen Manager, Center Store Manager or Assistant Manager, then Store Manager, then District Manager, then Region Director. It carries titles and sequence but no tenure gates and no pay attached.
• Vice President is deliberately absent from the band table. Governance materials confirm the tier exists through a two times salary ownership guideline, but no salary range, grant policy or grant size is disclosed anywhere, and inventing one would have been the single largest fabrication available in this bundle.
• Casey's postings state that the advertised hiring range is narrower than the full salary range and that actual pay depends on knowledge, skills, experience, local prevailing wages and internal equity. Every employer-posted figure here is therefore a hiring band, not a grade span.
• The Fikes and CEFCO acquisition added 198 stores in FY2025. No public filing describes inherited salary grades, a harmonisation schedule or legacy-band protections, so no claim is made that any acquired population sits on a different structure.
• Store hourly rates are annualized at 2,080 hours purely so they can be compared on one scale. Because 26,358 of 49,848 Team Members are part-time, that annualization overstates actual earnings for the majority of the store population.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Ankeny

Casey's does not disclose employee headcount by state, city or site, so this catalogue cannot be ranked by office size. The only distribution facts published are that roughly half the store estate sits in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois and that 71 percent of stores are in communities of fewer than 20,000 residents.

Ankeny anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Ankeny is the anchor because it holds the Store Support Center, one of the three distribution centres and the overwhelming majority of disclosed labour condition application worksites.
• Every US market in the table carries a base and total factor of exactly 1. That is not a simplification: the source bundle records the identical benchmark for every Casey's location and states directly that Casey's publishes no city-specific compensation multipliers.
• The one geographic signal Casey's does give is a wage-setting principle rather than a number. Its postings say local prevailing wages and internal equity affect pay, but no cost-of-living zones or differential percentages are published.
• District Manager postings quote an identical $88,700 to $110,900 hiring range across Knoxville, Omaha, Fargo and Fergus Falls, which is the strongest direct evidence that Casey's field pay does not vary by market in the way a national retailer's might.
• No offshore market appears in this report. Bengaluru, Sydney, Toronto, London, Auckland, Amsterdam, Singapore and Dubai were carried as explicit no-footprint states in the source bundle, and converting a US salary into rupees or pounds would create a local package that does not exist.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 2025 Plan reserve fell from 1,650,000 to 1,644,574 in its first year, a net depletion of just 5,426 shares. That does not mean only 5,426 units were granted. The fiscal-year grant table spans awards under both plans, and forfeited, cancelled or cash-settled 2018-plan shares can be added back to the 2025 reserve, so a simple grants-divided-by-pool utilisation calculation would be badly misleading.
• There were no stock options or stock appreciation rights outstanding at 30 April 2026. All FY2026 equity activity was grant, vest, performance adjustment, tax withholding and open-market sale, with no exercise population at all.
• 474,383 units were unvested at year-end at a weighted-average grant-date fair value of $342, an arithmetic $162.239 million. At the 25 August 2026 close of $824.92 the same units carried a gross market value of about $391.3 million, which illustrates how far realized value can run from the accounting figure in the proxy.
• Unrecognized compensation cost stood at $56.055 million and is expected to be recognized through FY2029, which gives the visible horizon of the currently outstanding awards.
• A performance-award adjustment of 112,666 units was recorded in FY2026, reflecting PSU cycles earning above target. That line, not new grants, is the largest single reason unit counts moved during the year.

2025 Plan capacity and FY2026 award activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The table shows the executive RSU schedule, which vests in equal thirds on the first three anniversaries. PSUs sit alongside it on a different shape entirely: nothing vests for three years, then the whole award settles at between 0 and 250 percent of target, generally on 15 June, subject to performance certification and continued employment. Because PSUs are 75 percent of executive target value, the practical result is that three quarters of an executive grant carries no interim liquidity and no floor.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• S1 through S3 store hourly and department roles have no public evidence of RSU eligibility. ESPP eligibility terms are not disclosed, and the 401(k) stock match is the only evidenced share exposure at this level.
• S4 Store Manager has no public evidence of a recurring RSU grant. Incentive participation may exist but the equity threshold is not disclosed.
• S5 and S6 field leadership have no public grant matrix. District Manager bonus eligibility is disclosed in postings; equity is not mentioned in any of them.
• C1 through C4 corporate individual contributors are inconsistent in the public record. Some postings mention equity and others do not, so no generalisation is defensible.
• M1 is the lowest confirmed grant. A Manager, Data Engineering posting explicitly included an annual RSU grant, which proves equity reaches at least some manager roles. It does not prove that all managers or directors receive one, and no grant size is published.
• M2 Vice President carries a stock-ownership guideline of two times salary, implying meaningful stock exposure, but Casey's discloses no grant policy, mix or size for the tier.
• M3 and M4 are fully disclosed: an annual long-term incentive at 75 percent PSUs and 25 percent RSUs, with individual grant counts and grant-date values published for every named executive.
• Non-employee directors receive a fixed annual equity retainer rather than a performance award, cliff vesting at the next annual meeting.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Ankeny

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $824.92 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

Named executives receive the same health, life and retirement benefits offered to Team Members, plus financial and tax planning, executive physicals, identity-theft protection and a $1,500 monthly automobile allowance. The chief executive additionally has a $1 million life-insurance policy and access to up to 50 hours of personal aircraft use. FY2026 all other compensation combined 401(k) matching, life-insurance premiums and those perquisites; no tax gross-ups were provided on any of them. The spread in that column is narrow for the four chief officers, running $77,441 to $98,543, and the chief executive's $483,060 is where the aircraft and insurance provisions show up.

Board compensation framework

Director pay is the most uniform table in the proxy: every one of the ten serving directors received an identical $162,406 stock award and the spread between the highest and lowest total, $340,501 against $270,501, comes entirely from committee and leadership retainers. Directors also receive travel reimbursement, group life insurance up to $50,000 and up to $10,000 a year for relevant education. Stanley J. Sutula III joined in June 2026, after the fiscal year closed, and received a prorated 51 RSUs vesting at the 2026 annual meeting.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The official store pathway is the strongest promotion signal Casey's publishes: Team Member, then Kitchen Shift Leader or Center Store Leader, then Kitchen Manager, Center Store Manager or Assistant Manager, then Store Manager, then District Manager, then Region Director. Alongside it sit ten formal leadership programmes, including dedicated development for Kitchen Managers, Store Managers and District Managers, a Leadership Excellence Certification and a Finance for Non-Financial Managers course, plus more than 500 hours of virtual learning across 800 classes. That is real investment in readiness, but readiness is not a timetable, and neither source establishes a guaranteed promotion window or pay increase.

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. 1Casey's runs two populations that behave differently, and both are carried in one band table here rather than split. That is safe only because there are no geographic factors to distort: every US market carries a base and total factor of exactly one, so the store ladder and the corporate ladder cannot pull a location cell in opposite directions. The two ladders are labelled separately and should be read as parallel structures, not as one continuous progression, because a Region Director and a corporate architect sit within about 5 percent of each other on pay while doing entirely unrelated jobs.
2. 2The M2 Vice President tier is deliberately absent from the band table. No salary, bonus target, grant policy or grant size is disclosed for it anywhere, and a row would have required inventing all four. It is carried in the career-levels section, the equity eligibility notes and the variable-pay table as an explicit gap instead.
3. 3The M3 and M4 executive rows are marked as excluded from the range chart. A $14.7 million chief executive package on the same axis as a $30,545 Team Member anchor would compress every employee band into a single line. Both rows remain in the table with full component detail.
4. 4No notional employer benefit load is added to any total compensation figure. Several source treatments of retail pay add an 8 to 15 percent benefit load to produce a total reward number; that is employer cost, not pay, and every total here is rebuilt from base plus target bonus plus annualized equity so that the components reconcile.
5. 5Total equals base for every band from S1 through M1, because no bonus target and no equity grant size is disclosed for any of them. Where a variable-pay entitlement is confirmed but unquantified, as with District Manager bonuses and the Manager, Data Engineering RSU grant, the component is carried as zero and the entitlement is described in prose rather than estimated.
6. 6The M3 row is a component-wise median of four named officers. Its components sum to $4,080,787 while the median of the four reported Summary Compensation Table totals is $4,089,931, a $9,144 difference that arises because a median of sums is not the sum of medians. The row uses the reconciling figure.
7. 7The two source bundles in this company folder are byte-identical, so there was no cross-bundle disagreement to resolve. The internal discrepancies that do exist are all rounding at the dollar level. The chief executive stock award appears as $9,647,959 in the equity grant table and $9,647,958 in the Summary Compensation Table, and this report uses the latter because it reconciles exactly to the disclosed total. For Ena Williams and Stephen P. Bramlage Jr. the disclosed components sum one dollar short of the disclosed totals of $5,138,191 and $4,949,310; both figures are carried exactly as filed rather than adjusted to reconcile.
8. 8The H-1B record count is inconsistent between aggregations. One source reports 19 positions across two states while a separate city-level aggregation lists 21 records across five location labels including a Georgia worksite, which would be a third state. Both figures are reported here rather than reconciled, because no source explains the difference.
9. 9No offshore market appears in the location table at all. The source bundle carried Bengaluru, Sydney, Toronto, London, Auckland, Amsterdam, Singapore and Dubai as explicit no-footprint selector states with no pay data, and reproducing them here would have implied a global footprint that Casey's filings do not support. Consequently the exchange-rate table carries the US dollar only.
10. 10Annualizing store hourly rates at 2,080 hours is a comparability device, not a claim about earnings. It overstates actual annual pay for the 26,358 part-time Team Members who make up 53 percent of the workforce, and the proxy median of $20,065 is the better guide to what a typical Casey's Team Member actually receives in a year.

Source register — 19 sources

Two very different years sit next to each other here. FY2025 added more than 4,000 Team Members almost entirely through acquisition, and FY2026 added 576 on organic store growth. The full-time to part-time split of 23,490 to 26,358 is the number that matters most for reading Casey's pay: it explains a $20,065 median employee, it explains why the CEO pay ratio is 735:1 rather than something closer to peer levels, and it means any annualized hourly figure in this report describes a minority of the workforce. Casey's does not disclose an attrition rate or any headcount breakdown by state, city or site.