How Cintas Pays

Field operations ladder — production and route

Management pipeline — trainee to general manager

Corporate professional and technical ladder — Level 1 through Level 3

Executive — vice president and above

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• B1 to B10 is a research taxonomy, not Cintas nomenclature. Cintas publishes role levels such as Production Associate I to IV and Software Engineer Level 2 and Level 3, but no enterprise-wide grade ladder, and no Cintas document uses a B-prefixed code.
• The technical ladder is genuinely short. Level 3 is the most senior individual contributor title evidenced anywhere in the postings or the visa records, and above it every disclosed step is a manager title.
• Two management pipelines are named programmes rather than grades. The Management Trainee rotates through sales, production and warehouse, office and service management; the Advanced Management Partner is positioned explicitly as a senior-leadership and general-manager pipeline.
• The vice-president row is modelled from the gap between the director anchor and the named-executive table. Cintas discloses no vice-president salary schedule, and the FY2025 proxy names only the chief executive, executive chairman, former chief financial officer, chief operating officer and general counsel.
• Executive Vice President and above are excluded from the priced ladder entirely and carried in the executive section instead, because they are single worldwide figures that would distort every Canadian cell if the city factors were applied to them.
• Canada has no disclosed band above General Manager. The bundle populates Canadian rows only to the director level and marks vice-president and above as not publicly disclosed.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Mason

Cintas operated 496 facilities in 346 cities at 31 May 2026, but publishes no headcount by city in either country. The subsidiary exhibit to the FY2026 Form 10-K verifies Canadian, Mexican, Honduran, Swiss and Singaporean entities, including Ensambles de Coahuila, Cintas de Honduras, CC Switzerland GmbH and CC Singapore PTE. LTD. Entity presence is not the same as a material employee hub, and no India, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand or Middle East operating site was substantiated, so those markets are omitted from the table entirely rather than shown with an invented factor.

Mason anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Mason, Ohio is the anchor because it is the only Cintas city with dense wage evidence: headquarters, the corporate and technology organisation, and 106 of the 110 certified labour condition applications in the FY2021 to FY2025 aggregation.
• US city factors run from 1.00 at Mason and Columbus to 1.18 in Los Angeles. They are analytical cost indices applied to the non-executive rows and are not disclosed Cintas geographic differentials.
• Canada is priced against Toronto and Mississauga, which sits at about 0.71 of Mason on base pay at the frontline. The other Canadian cities are indexed against Toronto at 0.96 for Montreal, 0.98 for Calgary and 1.04 for Vancouver and Burnaby.
• The Canadian gap widens with seniority rather than narrowing, the reverse of the offshore pattern. Frontline Canadian base sits at about 0.71 of Mason while the senior modelled rows fall to about 0.68 on base and 0.64 on total, so a Canadian director is further below a US director than a Canadian production associate is below a US one.
• Mexico, Honduras, Switzerland and Singapore are verified employing entities but carry no priced rows. Cintas disclosed roughly 550 Mexico and 700 Honduras employee-partners for FY2024 pay-ratio sampling without any city-level salary structure.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Plan capacity is not dilution. The 32,021,495 shares implied as used or committed by ceiling arithmetic include every grant made under the predecessor 2016 plan and are not the same as outstanding awards, grant-date fair value, accounting expense or realisable employee value.
• The market-price column is a reference only, taken at the 26 August 2026 CTAS price of $204.76. It is not a grant budget and not a forecast.
• FY2026 stock-based compensation expense was $128.1 million, about 1.1 percent of the year's $11.265 billion of revenue and roughly 4.9 percent of operating income.
• The $144.3 million of FY2026 Partners' Plan contributions is more than the entire stock-based compensation expense, which is the clearest single indication of where broad employee stock exposure actually comes from at Cintas.
• Non-qualified stock options are back in use for some executives. Rozakis and Denton received option awards on 10 August 2026 while Schneider and Garula received restricted stock only, and Schneider recorded no option awards at all in FY2025.

2016 Amended and Restated Equity and Incentive Compensation Plan capacity at 31 May 2026

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule above is the employee non-qualified stock option schedule: nothing vests in years one and two, then one third on each of the third, fourth and fifth anniversaries, with a ten-year term and an exercise price set at fair market value on the grant date. Default service-based restricted stock for employees is different again and vests 100 percent on the third anniversary as a single cliff rather than in tranches. Non-employee director equity generally vests after one year. Specific awards may vary and performance award terms are not broadly disclosed. Both employee schedules are unusually slow by large-cap standards, and the practical effect is that an executive who leaves Cintas before the third anniversary of a grant forfeits all of it.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The plan legally permits broad employee eligibility, but public evidence shows recurring awards going to Committee-selected officers, key employee-partners and directors.
• Cintas explicitly excluded equity from its FY2024 median-employee calculation because equity awards were not widely distributed. That is the company's own confirmation that the selective plan does not reach the median employee-partner.
• Below the director level, no recurring long-term incentive cadence was identified at any band, and no typical band grant size is disclosed anywhere.
• From the General Manager and Director level upward, selective key-employee equity becomes possible at Compensation Committee discretion, but frequency and size remain undisclosed.
• Broad stock exposure for US employee-partners runs through the Partners' Plan retirement employee stock ownership component after one year of service, not through grants.
• Canadian employee-partners have no broad employee stock ownership plan at all; they have a Deferred Profit Sharing Plan and an offered RRSP instead.

Named executive target equity

Todd M. Schneider remains Chief Executive Officer and Scott D. Farmer remains Executive Chairman. J. Michael Hansen retired as Chief Financial Officer and was succeeded by Scott A. Garula on 1 June 2025, so the FY2025 table still shows Hansen and there is no full-year Summary Compensation Table for Garula. James N. Rozakis was promoted from Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer to President and Chief Operating Officer effective 1 August 2026, and his current target package is known only because the promotion was material enough to require an 8-K. D. Brock Denton moved from Senior Vice President to Executive Vice President while retaining the Secretary and General Counsel roles.

Board compensation framework

Board pay is 63 percent equity by design, split evenly between restricted stock and options, and the one-year director vesting is materially faster than the three-year cliff employees face. Non-employee directors are not covered by the employee Partners' Plan. The narrow $270,054 to $317,554 spread across the board shows that committee fees, not attendance or tenure, are what differentiate director pay at Cintas.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What is evidenced is structural rather than numeric. Movement from the frontline into a trainee or professional role typically takes one to four years and depends on openings and training completion. The step from professional or Level 2 into Level 3 or supervision takes roughly three to seven years, and Level 3 technical postings commonly request about six years of relevant experience. The Advanced Management Partner step usually follows two to five years of supervision, and Location Manager postings often request five to seven years of management or profit-and-loss experience. Above General Manager no standard clock is disclosed at all.

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. 1Executive Vice President and Chief Executive rows were deliberately left out of the priced ladder and carried in the executive section instead. They are single worldwide figures, and letting the top-of-ladder interpolation reach them would have produced a Canadian chief executive at 0.68 of a US one, which Cintas does not disclose and which would be nonsense.
2. 2The priced ladder therefore stops at Vice President and Group Vice President, and that row is itself the weakest in the table: no official Cintas vice-president schedule exists, and its selective equity is shown as zero because no grant size is disclosed rather than because none is granted.
3. 3Totals were rebuilt from base plus target bonus plus equity. The research bundle's own totals folded in an employer benefit and retirement load of roughly 5 to 10 percent, which is employer cost rather than pay, so the totals here sit below the bundle's for every band.
4. 4One ladder is priced across the frontline, route, professional, technical and management populations because the bundle applies a single city index to all of them and no evidence of divergent geographic behaviour was found. That said, the hourly rows are floored by state and provincial minimum wage law in a way an analytical cost index does not model, so the Los Angeles frontline cell in particular should be read as a floor effect rather than a Cintas premium.
5. 5Cintas discloses no Canadian band above General Manager and Director. The Canadian top-of-ladder factors are therefore an extension of the disclosed director-level ratio rather than an observation.
6. 6Mexico, Honduras, Switzerland and Singapore are verified employing entities with no dependable public salary structure, so they carry no priced rows. India, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates appeared in the research bundle only as location-selector placeholders with no evidenced Cintas employing entity, and have been dropped entirely rather than shown as empty markets.
7. 7The two H-1B aggregators disagree on annual filing counts, reporting 23 against 29 certified applications for FY2025. Both figures are retained rather than averaged, and neither has been used to build a band.
8. 8Named-executive incentive targets for Schneider and Rozakis are derived by dividing the disclosed payout by the disclosed 150.24 percent attainment rather than being separately stated in the proxy. Schneider's derived target matches 150 percent of his salary exactly, which supports the derivation.
9. 9Award values in the insider table are share counts multiplied by the $203 reference grant price, which differs by fractions of a percent from the values printed in the research bundle and is not the accounting grant-date fair value. Option award lines carry no value at all because option fair value cannot be inferred from a strike price.
10. 10The UniFirst acquisition had not closed at the research cut. Every figure here is standalone Cintas, and post-close job architecture, band mapping and benefit harmonisation are entirely unknown.

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 — 32 sources

Headcount grew about 8 percent over three years and then flattened in FY2026 while revenue grew 8.9 percent, which implies rising revenue per employee-partner rather than expansion hiring. Cintas discloses no attrition rate on any basis and no headcount by city or country beyond the roughly 550 Mexico and 700 Honduras figures disclosed for FY2024 pay-ratio sampling, so the split between the United States and Canada cannot be stated. The UniFirst acquisition, if it closes, would add a workforce of comparable job mix and change all of these figures materially.