How Caterpillar Pays

Production and early-career population

Salaried professional ladder - G19 through G25

Leadership ladder - G26 through G28

Executive

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Grade labels G21 through G25 are the only ones public evidence supports directly, and they come from employee salary submissions and forum discussion rather than from any Caterpillar publication. G19, G20 and G26 through G28 are research reconstructions and should be validated against an internal requisition, Workday profile or offer letter before they are used in a hiring decision.
• Perkins Engines, Solar Turbines and other Caterpillar businesses retain local brands and role titles. No public source reviewed provides a legacy grade conversion table or a post-acquisition harmonisation schedule, so this report does not claim that every subsidiary uses identical grades.
• The hourly and production population does not sit on the salaried grade ladder at all. Its pay is set by classification, shift and plant economics, and at UAW-represented sites by the six-year collective agreement ratified in March 2023, whose reported terms included a $6,000 ratification bonus, 19 percent cumulative wage increases and scheduled lump-sum payments. Caterpillar publishes no negotiated wage scale, so no union rate is blended into the salaried anchors here.
• Many customer-facing roles in the Caterpillar ecosystem sit at independent dealers rather than at Caterpillar Inc. Dealer compensation is set by the dealer and should never be mixed into a Caterpillar band comparison.
• Caterpillar reports global and outside-United-States employee totals but no city-level headcount, so the concentration ranking of the Illinois, Texas, India and United Kingdom clusters used in this report is an inference from facility density and role breadth, not a reported census.
• Group President, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Chairman and board rows are deliberately excluded from the band table. Their disclosed United States figures are corporate pay that should not be multiplied by a city index, and including them would drag every offshore location's calibration factor towards 1.0 at the top of the ladder.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Irving / Dallas

The research bundle covers 102 Caterpillar locations in 36 countries. This report prices the 29 that carry either a public pay observation, a priority-market designation or a distinct role profile, and drops duplicate manufacturing sites that share a country index with a market already shown. Caterpillar discloses no city-level headcount, so presence here means an evidenced facility, not a weighting.

Irving / Dallas anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The anchor is Irving and Dallas, the global headquarters since 2022 and the market the bundle indexes at 1.00. Every factor in the footprint table is relative to it.
• Geography matters inside the United States as much as outside it. San Diego, home of Solar Turbines, prices 8 percent above the anchor and Chicago 3 percent above, while the Illinois manufacturing sites sit 5 to 9 percent below and Corinth, Mississippi, the lowest US market in the bundle, sits 16 percent below.
• Peoria remains the engineering and heritage centre of gravity even though the head office moved to Texas, and Mossville next door carries engine and powertrain research. Both price at 0.95 of the anchor.
• India is the largest professional workforce outside the United States. Chennai and Thiruvallur carry the India headquarters and large-machine manufacturing, Bengaluru the engineering and technology centre and the only public India pay anchor.
• Peterborough is the United Kingdom centre of gravity through Perkins engine design and manufacturing, and current UK postings are the most numerically useful non-US evidence in the bundle because they quote base ranges, bonus targets and pension terms directly.
• Geneva is the Europe, Africa and Middle East regional headquarters and the only market in this report modeled above the United States anchor on both base and total.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The arithmetic reduction from the authorised reserve since 2023 is 3,163,485 shares, or 7.44 percent. That figure understates true usage because fungible share counting, forfeitures, tax withholding, option valuation and recycled legacy shares all move the available count.
• Common shares issued from treasury under the plans were 1,433,723 in 2025, 1,972,037 in 2024 and 2,497,799 in 2023, a declining trend across three years.
• At the $811.29 share price on 25 August 2026 the remaining reserve carries a gross market value of about $31.9 billion. That is not accounting expense, expected dilution or the economic cost of future grants, and it should not be read as a compensation number.
• Caterpillar's careers material names executive management as the population that receives an annual long-term incentive grant. The 2023 plan permits awards far more broadly, but no minimum grade for routine eligibility is published anywhere, so grants below the officer tier should be treated as discretionary key-employee awards unless a grant notice says otherwise.

2023 Long-Term Incentive Plan reserve

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

This is Caterpillar's disclosed schedule for options and restricted stock units: one third on each of the first three anniversaries, not the four-year technology-sector convention. Performance restricted stock units follow a different path entirely, cliff vesting after a three-year performance period measured 50 percent on three-year average return on invested capital and 50 percent on relative total shareholder return for the 2025 executive grants, with 50 percent of target at threshold, 100 percent at target and 200 percent at maximum. RSUs and PRSUs accrue dividend-equivalent units that are forfeited if the award is forfeited; options carry no dividend equivalent. For 2024 and later executive grants, a qualifying change-in-control termination accelerates vesting at target on a double-trigger basis.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• No minimum grade for routine equity eligibility is publicly disclosed. This is the single largest gap in Caterpillar's compensation disclosure for anyone below officer level.
• Salary submissions at G21 through G23 occasionally include small stock amounts, between $300 and $2,500 a year, which is consistent with occasional one-off awards rather than a recurring grant policy.
• The bundle models discretionary key-employee ranges of $0 to $25,000 at G25, $0 to $50,000 at G26, $25,000 to $150,000 at G27 and $75,000 to $300,000 at G28. Only the last two have a non-zero floor, so this report carries a median grant of zero at G25 and G26.
• Vice President and above is the tier Caterpillar itself identifies as receiving an annual grant, and it is where equity overtakes cash in the package. Individual grant size is determined by the Compensation and Human Resources Committee and no schedule by title is published.
• Non-employee directors receive an annual RSU award with a $170,000 target that vests after one year, and are subject to a stock-ownership target of five times the cash retainer.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Irving / Dallas

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $811.29 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

Two features of 2025 are worth separating from the headline numbers. First, the chief human resources officer package is a hiring economics case study rather than a run-rate: $8,599,291 of equity dominated by 21,571 target PRSUs, a $450,000 hiring bonus and relocation support with tax gross-up, on a partial-year salary of $566,667. It shows that Caterpillar will pay a large bespoke premium for an external senior hire, but it establishes no company-wide lateral premium. Second, the executive chairman out-earned the incoming chief executive by $5.18 million purely because of grant timing, so a 2026 comparison against 2025 will show an artificial fall at the top of the house. The proxy separately identifies retirement-plan contributions, company aircraft and transport, security and relocation among perquisites, with substantial nonqualified deferred-plan contributions for both the chief executive and the executive chairman.

Board compensation framework

Director pay is flat and formula-driven: the $75,000 spread between the highest and lowest full-year director is entirely committee and lead-director retainers, not performance. The $170,000 equity component is more than half of a standard director's package and vests in one year, which is a materially shorter horizon than the three-year schedule the same plan applies to executives.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The only disclosed timing anchor is executive: average named-executive salary adjustments were effective in April in 2023, 2024 and 2025, at 5.75 percent, 3.0 percent and 4.0 percent respectively. Employees separately report that the short-term incentive is paid in March following the performance year, which implies a January to February calibration cycle, but that inference is modeled rather than disclosed and country or entity timing can differ. Union-represented employees sit on an entirely separate clock, with scheduled increases and lump sums set by the six-year agreement ratified in March 2023.

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. 1Group President, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Chairman and board rows were deliberately kept out of the band table. Their disclosed United States figures are identical in every city table in the source bundle, so including them would have forced every location's calibration factor towards 1.0 at the top of the ladder and produced absurd offshore cells. They are carried in the executive section instead, and the band table stops at the modeled Vice President row.
2. 2The source bundle applies a flat city pay index from hourly through G25 and then steps it sharply upward above G25, for example 0.20 at Bengaluru through G25 and 0.64 at G26 through G28. This report keeps the direction of that compression but not the step: the junior factor is the bundle's index and the senior factor is the index plus one quarter of the distance to 1.00, interpolated by band. Senior offshore cells therefore sit below the bundle's model, and mid-ladder India cells sit slightly above the observed Levels.fyi points.
3. 3No employer benefit load is included in any total. Where the source material quotes packages inclusive of superannuation, provident fund or social security, those employer costs have been stripped so that every usTotal reconciles to base plus bonus plus equity.
4. 4The named-executive incentive attainment column is derived, not disclosed. It divides the disclosed payout by the disclosed year-end salary rate multiplied by the disclosed target percentage, which produces 103 to 107 percent against Caterpillar's own certified average of 114 percent computed on eligible earnings. The executive chairman and the chief human resources officer are excluded from that table because mid-year role changes make a single-rate target meaningless for them.
5. 5MyVisaJobs and H1BGrader disagree on FY2026 visa volume, at 269 and 105 applications respectively. Both are shown; neither is averaged into a single figure.
6. 6The 2023 and 2024 year-end headcounts of 113,200 and 112,900 come from a third-party employee-count series rather than from the filings themselves; only the 118,000 figure for 2025 is taken directly from the 10-K.
7. 7The Deere chief executive figure in the peer table comes from a secondary proxy-data extraction and carries lower confidence than the Caterpillar, Cummins and PACCAR rows, which are taken from the filings.
8. 8The research bundle covers 102 locations in 36 countries; this report prices 29 of them. Sites dropped are duplicate manufacturing locations sharing a country index with a market already shown, and no city factor was invented to reach a count.
9. 9Caterpillar does disclose geographic revenue in its filings, but the reviewed bundle carried no regional revenue split, so no regional revenue panel is shown rather than one being reconstructed.
10. 10The stock column in the executive table combines disclosed stock awards and option awards, because the shared schema carries a single equity field. The split is given in full in the chief executive breakdown and in the named-executive grant table.

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 — 36 sources

Caterpillar does not publish quarterly headcount, attrition, city-level employee counts or a hiring plan. The 4.5 percent increase in 2025 is the largest single-year move in the three-year series and coincided with the year in which the disclosed median employee's pay rose from $63,238 to $89,253, but the median-employee figure is a pay-ratio disclosure that can reflect a newly identified employee, so the two should not be read as one story.