How Cisco Pays

Early career

Technical ladder — Grade 4 through Cisco Fellow

Management ladder — Grade 11 through Grade 15

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Public salary datasets repeatedly surface Grades 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13 for software engineering and Grades 11 upward for management, with the odd numbers between them either unused for these families or simply unobserved. Cisco has never published a canonical cross-function grade chart.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for software and hardware engineering. Sales, customer experience, supply chain, finance and human resources may place equivalent scope at different grades, and no public evidence supports a complete Grade 1 to Grade 15 map across all of them.
• Sales roles run on quota, commission and accelerators rather than the grade-linked variable targets shown here. Total cash for a sales role at the same nominal grade can be much larger and much more volatile, and the engineering table is not a valid sales benchmark.
• Cisco assumes acquired-company awards on acquisition. Vesting, conversion and tax terms on those legacy grants can differ from a standard Cisco grant, and no single post-merger harmonisation schedule is public.
• Distinguished Engineer and Cisco Fellow are technical apex titles rather than numbered grades. Their prevalence, selection process and compensation are not publicly disclosed, and the rows here are modelled extensions of the Grade 13 curve.
• The non-employee director package is a governance arrangement rather than an employment band and is carried in the executive section rather than in the ladder.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus San Jose

Cisco discloses global headcount but not employee counts by city. Bangalore, San Jose and Research Triangle Park are directionally the largest hubs on job-posting and filing evidence, but no forensic ranking by office is possible from public sources.

San Jose anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The San Jose column is the anchor. Grade 4 through Grade 13 medians come from public United States software-engineering records, and the Grade 11 through Grade 15 rows are calibrated to the same dataset's engineering-management family.
• San Jose itself carries a 1.12 city factor against the wider United States benchmark in the source calibration, which is why domestic sites such as Research Triangle Park at 0.77 and Seattle at 0.94 sit below it here.
• Bangalore is the India reference. Direct observations exist at Grades 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11; the grades above are modelled from the United States curve and an India multiplier, which is why the India column flattens at roughly 20.5 percent of San Jose.
• India, Australia and Poland are the only three markets in this bundle where the gap to San Jose narrows measurably with seniority. The United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore, Japan, China, Mexico, Israel, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates are flat across the ladder in the source tables, so no top-of-ladder factor is set for them.
• EVP, President and CEO packages are proxy disclosures for a handful of named individuals. They are carried in the executive section only and are deliberately excluded from the band ladder, so no city factor is ever applied to an executive figure.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 928.040 million figure is a cumulative historical authorisation across every amendment, not an unused pool. The number that matters for future grants is the 157.040 million available at 26 July 2025.
• The 1.5-share fungible ratio means the plan burns capacity faster than the raw grant count suggests: 69.486 million full-value awards granted in FY2025 consume more than 104 million reserve shares.
• Outstanding awards divided by outstanding plus available capacity gives an analytical 42.6 percent ratio. That is a planning number constructed here, not a metric Cisco defines or publishes.
• The performance award figure of 8.8 million assumes maximum settlement. The actual outcome can be materially lower, because performance awards adjust on relative total shareholder return.
• The purchase plan's 50 million shares sit outside the 2005 plan entirely, so purchase-plan issuance does not consume incentive-plan capacity.

Plan capacity and FY2025 grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Neither pattern is universal. The roughly 34 percent then 8.25 percent quarterly schedule is the pattern most visible in individual filings and employee records, but the award agreement governs in every case and acquired-company awards can carry entirely different terms. Executive performance awards run over a three-year performance period instead.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• All employees, consultants and non-employee directors are legally eligible under the 2005 plan, but the plan makes no automatic grants and creates no entitlement. Eligible and typically granted are two different fields and should never be conflated in an offer conversation.
• Public compensation samples show equity as rare at Early career, selective from Grade 4 through Grade 8, common but discretionary from Grade 10 and Grade 11, expected from Grade 13, and a core component of the package from Grade 14 and Grade 15 upward.
• The observed Grade 8 equity median of about $2,700 sits below the Grade 6 median of about $7,500. That is a small-sample artefact rather than evidence of a policy, and it is why the Grade 8 total in this report reads low against its base.
• Grant values in the source bundle are expressed as three-year face values divided by the $111.11 share price of 26 August 2026. A 1,000-share grant is $111,110 of face value before vesting, taxes and forfeiture risk, and the number moves with the share price every day.
• The purchase plan is the most portable component of a Cisco package because it operates in more than 70 countries, whereas grant incidence varies sharply by grade, business unit and hiring situation.

Indicative annual grant value by band — San Jose

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $111.11 reference price at 26 August 2026, 12:55 UTC market snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The FY2025 named executive group is the chief executive, the former chief financial officer, the President and Chief Product Officer, the Chief Legal Officer and the Executive Vice President for Operations. Mark Patterson, who took the chief financial officer role at the very end of FY2025, does not appear in the FY2025 compensation tables but does appear in Form 4 filings from 2026, which is the only public window on his pay so far. The FY2026 proxy had not been filed at the research date, so no FY2026 executive figures exist.

Board compensation framework

The director package is a governance arrangement rather than an employment band, so it is excluded from the ladder and from the range chart. The FY2026 increase from $245,000 to $270,000 of annual equity is the only forward-looking pay change Cisco had disclosed at the research date.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Indicative time in level runs 1.5 to 3 years from Grade 4 to Grade 6, 2 to 4 years to Grade 8, 3 to 5 years to Grade 10, 3 to 6 years to Grade 11 and to Grade 12, and 4 to 7 years to Grade 13. Above Director the timing is entirely role and market dependent. None of this is Cisco policy; it is the pattern visible in public employee reports and should be treated as low-confidence.

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 rows are excluded from the ladder by design. EVP, President and CEO packages are proxy disclosures for a handful of named individuals, and folding a single global executive figure into the band table would force every city factor toward 1.0 at the top and produce nonsense such as an India-based leader on a United States chief executive base. The ladder therefore ends at Grade 15 and Cisco Fellow, both at seniority 10, and every executive figure lives in the executive section only.
2. 2The India curve is convex and the interpolation is linear. Bangalore reaches its roughly 20.5 percent plateau by Grade 10 in the observed data, whereas the junior-to-top interpolation used here reaches it only at the top of the ladder. Modelled Bangalore cells at Grade 8 through Grade 13 therefore sit roughly 6 to 13 percent below the directly observed medians, and the Grade 4 and Grade 6 cells sit slightly above them. Australia and Poland share the same shape to a smaller degree.
3. 3The Grade 8 anchor carries a $2,700 equity median that is lower than Grade 6. That depresses the Grade 8 United States total, which in turn inflates every offshore ratio measured at Grade 8. The Grade 8 India ratio of 0.219 is the highest in the whole India table for this reason and is a United States sampling artefact rather than evidence of Indian seniority premium.
4. 4No employer benefit load is included anywhere. The source bundle quotes a United States crowd estimate of roughly $12,900 a year of benefit value and treats Indian CTC as sometimes inclusive of employer statutory costs. Both are employer cost rather than pay, and every total in this report is rebuilt as base plus target variable plus annualised equity so that the columns reconcile.
5. 5The Canadian Grade 10 sample reads about 10 percent below the rest of the Canadian curve, which sits near 0.60 of San Jose at every other grade. This report uses 0.60 for Toronto and accepts that the Grade 10 Canadian cell will read high against the source bundle's own Grade 10 comparison table.
6. 6FY2026 filings did not exist at the research date. Headcount, plan reserves, executive pay and the pay ratio are all FY2025 figures for a fiscal year that ended 26 July 2025, while revenue is FY2026. The FY2026 Form 10-K and proxy will move the headcount, the reserve and the executive figures.
7. 7The source bundle contains no geographic revenue split, so no regional revenue panel is shown. Cisco's founding year and exchange ticker are not stated in the bundle either; the ticker is carried from the Nasdaq listing and the filing identifiers, and no founding year is claimed.
8. 8Percentile figures below the sponsor median in the visa data, and the city quartiles outside San Jose, are analytical approximations rather than published values. Only medians and record counts are directly sourced.

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 — 33 sources

Cisco discloses headcount once a year in the Form 10-K and does not break it down by city, country or function. The FY2026 figure will land below 86,200 if the announced reduction is fully executed, but hiring in AI, silicon, optics and security runs in the opposite direction, so the net is not predictable from public sources. No attrition series exists to fill the gap.