How Cboe Global Markets Pays

Individual contributor ladder — B1 through B5

Management ladder — B6 through B8

Officer ladder — B9 through B12

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• B1 through B12 is a comparison layer, not a Cboe designation. No reviewed filing, careers page or job posting exposes a numbered grade, a band minimum or a midpoint for any ordinary employee.
• The mapping is most reliable for exchange technology, market operations, clearing and regulatory roles, and least reliable for sales, index and market-data commercial roles where revenue ownership can move an individual well outside the band.
• Vice president, senior vice president and executive vice president are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers. In parts of financial services a vice president title is a mid-level grade; at officer scope in this model it is not.
• Equity expectation is shown as role-dependent from B5 upward and is not assumed at B1 to B4, because Cboe discloses plan capacity and executive awards but no eligibility threshold by level.
• Legacy entity structures inherited from Bats Global Markets, Chi-X Australia, MATCHNow and NEO are not represented as separate ladders. No reviewed source describes how, or whether, those populations were harmonised into a single architecture.
• The non-employee director row is a governance package rather than an employment band and is excluded from every band table and chart.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Chicago

Cboe publishes no office-level or country-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank markets by employee count. The operating-status label on each market is the more useful signal: nine markets are treated as current Cboe operating locations, three carry 2026 transition or wind-down labels, and the remainder are external benchmark scenarios retained for comparison.

Chicago anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Chicago is the anchor column. Its band medians are built from United States financial-market role economics, employer-posted Cboe salary ranges and government wage records, then scaled by seniority and expected variable-pay leverage.
• Every other market is a flat multiple of Chicago. The source model applies one factor per city at every band, so no market compresses or widens up the ladder in this report.
• London at 0.93 of Chicago is the most consequential factor in the table, because it is the only large non-United States market with a confirmed Cboe workforce and a Cboe-specific benefit disclosure.
• Bengaluru at 0.25 of Chicago is the widest gap in the model, but it is a benchmark scenario rather than a Cboe pay position: no material Cboe India workforce was identified in any reviewed disclosure.
• Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver and Tokyo remain in the table as transition and historical context. They should not be read as current Cboe operating markets after the 2026 TMX transaction and the Japan wind-down.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

• The 5.45 million share reserve is capacity for future issuance, not outstanding dilution and not a promise to any employee.
• Spread evenly across the 1,661 employees the reserve would be about 3,280 shares each, which is a useful scale check rather than an allocation: named executive and officer grants absorb a disproportionate share of any equity plan.
• No burn rate, overhang percentage or unrecognised stock compensation figure is carried in the reviewed sources, so plan life cannot be estimated from this page.
• Because reviewed executive awards run over three-year performance periods, an equity offer quoted on a four-year schedule should be checked against the actual award agreement rather than assumed.

Equity plan capacity

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Equity expectation is treated as role-dependent from B5 upward and is not assumed at B1 to B4. That is a modelling choice driven by the absence of disclosure, not a statement that junior employees are excluded.
• Plan capacity and executive awards prove that Cboe grants equity. They do not prove a universal grant, and no reviewed source describes a broad-based annual refresh.
• The employee stock purchase plan is the only equity component an employee can size themselves, but its terms are undisclosed, so its value cannot be estimated on this page.
• Performance-based awards carry settlement risk that time-based awards do not. Where a Cboe offer includes a performance award, the metric, the measurement period and the payout curve are the terms that matter most.
• Every band on this page shows zero equity value. That is an evidence statement about disclosure, not a claim that a Cboe package contains no stock.

Both rows show the reported total undecomposed, because the salary, cash incentive, stock and other split was not carried in the reviewed sources. A Cboe proxy total is dominated by grant-date stock value in a normal year, so these figures should be read as accounting cost of the package rather than as money received.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one structural signal that is disclosed sits in equity rather than cash: reviewed named executive awards operate over three-year performance periods, which suggests a longer measurement rhythm than the annual cycle common in technology. For everyone below the officer tier there is no published cadence at all, and the median employee compensation figure in the pay-ratio disclosure is not a matched-worker wage index because the identified median employee and the methodology can change between years.

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The chief executive figures used here come from the Cboe 2026 proxy statement as cited in the Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange bundles of the same 2026 corpus, not from the Cboe bundle itself, which carries only the median employee, the ratio and the equity reserve. They are traceable to a named filing, and they are flagged as second-hand here for that reason.
2. 2The 102 to 1 ratio implies about $20.2 million of chief executive compensation while the summary compensation total is $18,347,037. Both figures are reported as disclosed rather than reconciled to each other, and the most likely explanation is annualisation of a partial-year chief executive.
3. 3No named executive line items are shown, and no split is estimated, because inventing a salary, incentive and stock breakdown to fill the chart would misrepresent a filing that does publish one.
4. 4The insider trade table and the board compensation table are intentionally empty. Cboe insiders do file Forms 3, 4 and 5, but no individual filing was captured in the research bundle, and an incomplete set would look more authoritative than it is.
5. 5Every location factor is flat across the ladder, so no baseFactorTop or totalFactorTop is set on any market. That is the source model's own finding rather than a simplification, and it means this report does not model level-dependent geographic compression for Cboe.
6. 6The B12 named executive row is a modelled cash structure at enterprise-leadership scope, not the audited proxy figure, and it is excluded from the range chart so that a 2.4 times cash multiple does not compress every other band. The proxy figures are carried in the executive section only.
7. 7Total cash in the source model is base plus target variable pay with no employer benefit load, so no benefit loading had to be stripped out to make totals reconcile. Base plus bonus equals total in every band on this page.
8. 8Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver and Tokyo are retained with 2026 transition labels rather than deleted. Their pay data should be read as legacy Cboe context, and their employment position now sits with TMX Group or, for Japan, with no entity at all.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-26

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 — 14 sources

A 1,661-person workforce running a global options, equities and derivatives franchise is the single most important structural fact on this page. It explains the $197,994 median employee, the 102 to 1 ratio and the absence of any low-wage population, and it means that the 2026 disposals of the Australian and Canadian businesses and the Japanese wind-down are material to headcount in a way that a comparable change would not be at a larger employer. Cboe publishes no city or country headcount, so the size of each market in this model is unknown.