How Charles River Laboratories Pays

Operations and technician ladder — B0 through B2

Scientific ladder — B3 through B5

Expert and management fork — B6 through B7

Leadership ladder — B8 through B10

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• No official band numbers were found in any reviewed filing, careers page or job posting. B0 to B10 is an analytical catalogue built so that a Tranent scientist and a Reno scientist can be compared, and it should never be quoted back to a recruiter as a Charles River grade.
• A numeric title suffix is a job-family level, not a company-wide grade. Research Scientist I to VII, Animal Technician I to IV and Biomanufacturing Technician I to III each number independently, so a III in one family is not a III in another.
• The Roman numeral does not mean entry level. Several Research Scientist I postings asked for around six years of experience, which is why that title is mapped to B4 rather than to the bottom of the ladder.
• The crosswalk is most reliable in scientific and laboratory-operations families, where Charles River posts explicit United States ranges, and least reliable in sales, business development and digital roles, where variable pay and quota structures are entirely unpublished.
• Charles River has acquired and divested repeatedly, but no public source documents an enterprise-wide legacy grade conversion or harmonisation matrix, so acquired-site title structures cannot be reconciled here.
• The officer and director tiers are corporate designations, not the top of an employee ladder, and are carried in the executive section rather than in the band table.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Wilmington, MA

Charles River publishes a location directory but not city-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by size. The only geographic population figures in the filings are the regional workforce split and the small per-country counts disclosed in the pay-ratio de minimis analysis.

Wilmington, MA anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Wilmington is the anchor because it is the global headquarters and the only market where company job postings cover the ladder from technician to senior director. Its band medians are the midpoints of those posted ranges.
• Shrewsbury at 0.97 and Reno at 0.90 are calibrated from direct company postings in those cities, which is why a Research Scientist I is posted at $100,000 to $110,000 in Shrewsbury and from $95,000 in Reno.
• Mattawan, Michigan at 0.78 is the largest safety-assessment campus in the visa record and the clearest evidence that site choice moves pay more than title does: its captured H-1B median is $76,594 with 87 percent of records below $100,000.
• Tranent near Edinburgh at 0.50 carries the European scientist anchor, resting on Glassdoor United Kingdom records of £25,000 to £31,000 for a Scientist and £34,000 to £40,000 for a Senior Scientist.
• Bangalore at 0.16 is the lowest factor in the table and the least evidenced. Charles River disclosed only 68 employees in India in the pay-ratio population, and the sole company-specific Indian salary observation is a two-profile reported average of ₹18.2 lakh.
• Segment headcount was roughly 11,760 in Discovery and Safety Assessment, 4,140 in Research Models and Services and 2,600 in Manufacturing Solutions, so the scientific bands carry most of the workforce.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Share usage, the company's own burn-rate measure, was 1.05 percent in 2023, 0.95 percent in 2024 and 1.34 percent in 2025, for a three-year average of 1.11 percent. The 2025 rise came alongside the restructuring rather than alongside headcount growth.
• Stock-based compensation expense has been remarkably flat: $72.048 million in 2023, $69.891 million in 2024 and $71.083 million in 2025, against a workforce that fell from roughly 21,800 to 19,700 over the same period.
• The 2018 plan's 2,274,083 unused shares were deliberately not carried into the 2026 plan, so the 4,825,000 newly registered shares are the whole current authority rather than an addition to an existing balance.
• At the $297.64 report-date reference share price a $1 million target grant is roughly 3,360 shares before valuation discounts, performance leverage and grant-date price differences. Grant-date fair value in the filings governs, not this illustration.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Restricted stock units principally vest over four years and executive annual awards commonly vest ratably across that period; options also vest over four years with a ten-year term. Performance share units do not follow this schedule at all. They run a single three-year performance period and settle once, so the four-year table applies to the restricted and option components only. Under the French sub-plan no award may vest before the first anniversary, and if vesting occurs before two years a holding period runs until the second anniversary.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The plan permits awards to eligible employees, officers, directors and other service providers, but Charles River publishes no minimum eligible band, no routine grant size below senior leadership and no pool utilisation by grade. Plan eligibility is not evidence that every employee receives stock.
• The public evidence supports exact executive grants, general award mechanics and the existence of a United States employee stock purchase plan. It does not support a conclusion either way about routine grants at B0 to B8, which is why this report shows a real zero in the band table rather than a guess.
• The first band with any public equity marker at all is B10, where a designated Corporate Vice President becomes subject to a 1x base stock-ownership guideline. That is evidence of senior equity participation, not evidence of a minimum grant size.
• Stock-ownership guidelines rise steeply through the officer tier: 1x base at Corporate Vice President, 2x at Senior Vice President, 3x at Corporate Executive Vice President and 6x at Chief Executive Officer.
• Non-employee directors receive equity under the separate director compensation programme, with FY2025 totals generally between $320,708 and $365,859 including cash retainers, subject to a plan cap and holding requirements.
• 2025 performance share units were scored on first-year non-GAAP earnings per share plus three-year relative total shareholder return, paying 0 to 200 percent. The relative return component adjusts the base result by plus or minus 35 percentage points, and a result below 90 percent of the earnings target pays nothing for the whole grant.

Named executive target equity

The FY2025 table is a transition-year artefact and should be read as such. Foster's numbers are a full year as chief executive; Girshick's are a full year as chief operating officer, not as chief executive, so her $5,898,392 total understates the role she now holds. Pease appears with $2,409,546 of stock awards but a zero cash incentive, the signature of a departure before the payout date. Knell's row mixes a Senior Vice President base with the workload of an interim Chief Financial Officer. The forward-looking numbers that actually describe the current leadership are in the appointment filings rather than in this table: a $1.2 million chief executive base with a 100 percent target and $9.0 million of initial equity, and an $800,000 chief financial officer base with an 85 percent target, a $3.0 million annual award and $3.5 million of one-time restricted units.

Board compensation framework

Ten non-employee directors were disclosed for FY2025 in a tight $320,708 to $365,859 band, a spread of only 14 percent between the highest and lowest paid. Nancy Andrews sold 573 shares on 18 August 2026 at $285.24, the only director open-market transaction in the captured Form 4 window.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one part of the calendar with real visibility is the executive cycle: salary actions approved in May and effective at the end of June, with annual equity granted in the second quarter after the annual meeting. The 29 May 2026 restricted stock unit grants to Glenn Coleman and Joseph LaPlume at $180.71 a share are that cycle in the Form 4 record. Nothing equivalent is published for the employee population, and no market-correction or off-cycle adjustment schedule was found, so any local adjustment should be confirmed with the hiring manager or in the offer letter.

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. 1Only one research bundle exists for Charles River, so no cross-bundle disagreement had to be resolved. The trade-off is that every figure rests on a single research pass and no second extraction was available to check it against.
2. 2The officer and chief executive rows are deliberately excluded from the band table. Their pay is a global peer-market figure that appears identically in every city table in the source material, and applying a 0.16 India factor or a 0.50 United Kingdom factor to a $1.2 million chief executive base would manufacture a local executive scale that does not exist. Those figures are carried in the executive section instead, and the employee ladder runs B0 to B10 at seniority 1 to 11.
3. 3The source model computed total compensation as base multiplied by a notional employer-cost uplift running from 1.06 times at B0 to 1.8 times at B10. That is employer cost rather than pay, so it has been removed and total has been rebuilt from components, which makes total equal base for every band.
4. 4City calibration factors are the bundle's own planning multipliers rather than observed ratios in most markets. Only Shrewsbury, Reno, Mattawan, Tranent, Montréal, Lyon, Melbourne and Bangalore have any direct local observation behind them, and Bangalore's rests on a two-profile reported average.
5. 5Base and total factors are identical and flat across the ladder, and no top-of-ladder factor is applied, because the source model evidences no level-dependent geographic compression for this operating model. If Charles River does grant equity below the officer tier, the real international ratios would widen at senior bands and these factors would understate them.
6. 6The four H-1B aggregators cannot be merged. FY2025 counts run 37 against 39 and medians run $110,000 against $113,740 against $133,179, and no captured source publishes a reconciled USCIS approval rate, so none is stated.
7. 7The 2023 headcount of roughly 21,800 is inferred from the disclosed 2024 percentage decline rather than separately disclosed, and is labelled as such in the workforce table.
8. 8The employee stock purchase plan is confirmed to exist but none of its economics were verified, so no purchase discount value appears anywhere in this report.
9. 9No company-wide 2026 salary increase percentage, pay freeze, salary cut, campus offer revision or off-cycle correction was located in any reviewed source.

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 — 19 sources

The workforce shrank about 10 percent across two years while stock-based compensation expense stayed flat between $69.9 million and $72.0 million, so equity spend per remaining employee rose even though no new employee grant programme was announced. Voluntary turnover falling from 11.1 to 10.1 percent alongside site closures is a mixed signal: fewer people are leaving by choice, but the population they are leaving is smaller and has already absorbed involuntary reductions. Median employee compensation for FY2025 was $61,430, and comparable prior-year medians should be read from each proxy's own methodology rather than treated as a series, because the population and the selection change year to year.