How Centene Pays

Individual-contributor ladder — C1 through C4

Management ladder — M1 through M4

Executive — named executive officers

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Centene has never published a band chart, a grade midpoint, a compa-ratio or a range-penetration rule, so nothing in this catalogue should be quoted back as a Centene band. Every level here is an analytical overlay on official postings.
• The bands are most reliable in technology, analytics and clinical operations, where postings and visa records overlap, and least reliable in sales, network contracting and corporate functions, where a single posting is the only evidence.
• WellCare and Health Net remain visible in Centene's locations, titles and leadership biographies, but no public evidence supports a mapping from legacy grade codes to a harmonised Centene framework, so none is asserted here.
• Vice President and Senior Vice President are corporate titles rather than a hidden grade number. The two current vice-president postings differ by $88,100 at the top of range, which is why M4 is shown as an envelope rather than a midpoint.
• The three executive rows are actual fiscal 2025 outcomes for named individuals, not hiring ranges, and they are excluded from the range chart because a $19.5 million accounting total would flatten the employee ladder to a single line.
• Assumed Magellan awards preserve equity for their existing holders only. They do not establish a parallel employee population or a separate current hierarchy.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus St. Louis

Centene reports total team members in its Form 10-K and nothing by office, state or country, so this catalogue does not rank markets by headcount. The twenty-one entries are the markets the operating-footprint review verified as active, plus the remote and national category that most 2026 postings are advertised under.

St. Louis anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• St. Louis is the anchor because it is the headquarters city and carries the largest single block of observable wage evidence, at 24 of the 96 displayed 2025 labour condition applications with a median of $140,306.
• Centene publishes no city differential schedule at all. Its own stated method is to read the range on the specific posting and the posting's lawful pay-adjustment clause, which is why seventeen of the twenty-one markets here sit at the anchor rather than carrying an invented multiplier.
• Four markets carry an observed factor derived from the 2025 visa medians against the St. Louis median: Folsom at 1.30, Wesley Chapel at 1.19, Tampa at 1.01 and Irving at 0.91. All four samples are small, and Folsom, Wesley Chapel and Irving rest on four to five records each.
• California markets are shown at the anchor even though state pay-transparency law forces Centene to post ranges there, because the only Californian wage observation in the bundle is Folsom, a technology worksite that is not representative of Sacramento, Woodland Hills or Long Beach plan operations.
• The executive rows are enterprise disclosures for named individuals. They do not vary by city and should not be read as a local pay range in any selected market.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• A single pool utilisation rate is not determinable from Centene's public tables. Authorised shares, outstanding full-value awards, legacy assumed awards and future availability do not share a one-for-one denominator, and the aggregate table mixes several plans.
• Restricted stock units dominate the outstanding population at roughly 11,548,179 units against about 393,047 options, so Centene's equity overhang is a full-value overhang rather than an option overhang.
• Grant activity in 2025 was roughly 8.836 million restricted stock units granted, 2.593 million vested and 1.047 million forfeited, a gross grant rate far above the vesting rate.
• Fiscal 2025 stock compensation expense was $204 million with a further $356 million unrecognised over about 2.1 years. That is an accounting expense, not a cash pool available for grants.
• About 2,650 employees plus 11 directors held awards at 15 March 2025 against a 61,100 year-end workforce, roughly 4.3 percent. The dates do not match, so treat it as an indicative selectivity signal rather than a participation rate.

Equity plan position at 31 December 2025

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The one-third-a-year pattern is the executive restricted stock unit schedule disclosed in the proxy. Performance share units follow a different clock entirely: the 2025 cycle is certified and vests in March 2028 if earned, and settles anywhere between 50 and 200 percent of target. Centene has published no vesting schedule for any employee award below the executive tier, and the chief executive's January 2026 grant shows that even within the executive tier the schedules vary, splitting 138,859 units over three years and 69,429 units over five.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Formal eligibility under the 2025 plan is broad, covering employees, officers, non-employee directors, consultants and advisors, but selection is entirely at the committee's discretion.
• The correct answer to the question of a minimum band for restricted stock units is that it is not publicly disclosed. Eligibility language is not an entitlement and the 2,650 award-holder count shows how selective the practice is.
• The Employee Stock Purchase Plan is the only clearly broad-based share mechanism, and the only one an employee can size for themselves through a 1 to 10 percent payroll election.
• Vice-president postings do not state an equity grant, so even at the M4 level a candidate cannot read a grant expectation off the public record.
• Executive equity is where the disclosure is complete: the 2025 long-term incentive mix was 60 percent performance share units and 40 percent restricted stock units for every named executive.

Indicative annual grant value by band — St. Louis

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $65 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 2025 approved base salaries show differentiated market and scope adjustments rather than a single merit grid: London to $1,500,000 at 7 percent, Asher to $1,200,000 at 17 percent, Koster to $775,000 at 3 percent, McNally to $675,000 at 13 percent and Smith to $725,000 at 4 percent. The proxy notes that London, Asher and Koster had not received an increase since 2022 and cites increased scope and market positioning. The incoming chief financial officer's package is the clearest evidence of what lateral executive hiring costs at Centene: $1.1 million base, a 150 percent bonus target capped at 200 percent of target, a $5.25 million 2027 long-term incentive target, $10.0 million of make-whole restricted stock units in three equal annual instalments and a $2.0 million cash sign-on payment.

Board compensation framework

Eleven directors held equity awards at 15 March 2025. A director package of $120,000 cash plus $225,000 of restricted stock units is a governance retainer rather than an employment band, and it sits above the analytical M2 director midpoint of about $197,850 despite being part-time work, which is a useful reminder that the word director means two entirely different things in this company.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The only quantified internal progression evidence Centene publishes is at the top of the house: 43 percent of vice-president and above openings were filled internally in 2025, succession plans were delivered for 30 critical roles and 30 additional key-talent roles, more than 35,000 employees took the annual culture survey and nearly 90 percent engaged with at least one instrument. These show an active talent process. They reveal nothing about promotion odds, calibration or pay outcomes below the executive layer.

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. 1The three executive rows are kept inside the band table but are marked chart-excluded, and because every priced market in this report is in the United States at a fixed factor there is no seniority interpolation anywhere. No offshore cell is therefore distorted by a global executive figure, which is the usual failure mode when proxy rows sit in an employee ladder.
2. 2Bonus and equity are recorded as zero for every band from C1 through M4, so total compensation equals base salary for those rows. That is a disclosure gap, not a finding that Centene pays no bonus. Postings state that additional incentives may apply and give no way to size them.
3. 3No employer benefit load is added to any total in this report. Centene's benefits are economically material but cannot be valued from public plan summaries, and adding a notional 8 to 15 percent would convert employer cost into pay.
4. 4Seventeen of the twenty-one markets sit at the anchor factor of 1.00 because no wage observation exists for them. This reflects Centene's own stated position that pay is set by the posting rather than by the city, and it should not be read as a finding that Sacramento and Great Falls pay the same.
5. 5The two visa datasets disagree on the 2025 count, 96 displayed records against 115 certified applications, and this report presents both rather than reconciling them, because labour condition applications, prevailing-wage requests and petitions are different processes with different denominators.
6. 6The chief executive pay ratio uses $19,516,298 while the Summary Compensation Table shows $19,506,298. The $10,000 difference is a medical benefits adjustment inside the ratio calculation and both figures are disclosed as filed.
7. 7The 2,650 award-holder count is dated 15 March 2025 while the 61,100 headcount is dated 31 December 2025. The resulting 4.3 percent participation figure is indicative only.
8. 8The equity plan tables cannot yield a single pool utilisation rate, because authorised shares, outstanding full-value awards, legacy assumed awards and future availability do not share a common denominator across the plans they cover.
9. 9A crowd-reported 401(k) match of 50 percent on the first 6 percent could not be traced to a current authoritative plan document and is excluded from the verified benefit rows.
10. 10The board retainer increase is dated to February 2026 in the proxy without a day, and the news entry carries the first of that month as a placeholder date.
11. 11Approximate 2025 revenue of about $195 billion appears in the bundle without a filing citation and is therefore not carried in any metric in this report.
12. 12No exchange rate other than USD is used anywhere, because no Centene pay in any other currency was verified. The bundle's own report-date table of INR 95.4191, AUD 1.3924, GBP 0.7334, EUR 0.8573, PHP 61.5706, NZD 1.6792, SGD 1.2700 and AED 3.6725 per US dollar is recorded here for completeness only.

Source register — 42 sources

On a comparable basis Centene has been broadly flat at just under 61,000 people for three years, and the apparent 2023 to 2024 collapse is an artefact of divesting a hospital business rather than a reduction in the core workforce. That flat line is about to break: the voluntary separation program that commenced on 27 July 2026 carries $315 million to $365 million of estimated severance expense for the remainder of the year, and no audited year-end 2026 count exists yet. Centene reports total team members only, with no split by office, state, country or function.