How Coca-Cola Pays

Frontline ladder — Band 1

Professional ladder — Band 2 through Band 3

Management ladder — Band 4 through Band 7

Executive ladder — Band 8 through Band 10

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• No public document lists every Coca-Cola grade from entry level to chief executive. The Band 1 to Band 10 labels here are this report's operating map and are not names the company uses.
• The three grade numbers that are genuinely public come from SEC-filed employment letters: job grade 18 for a vice president and controller, job grade 19 for a chief technical officer, and job grade 26 for the chief executive. Everything between grades 1 and 17 is inferred from equity-threshold evidence, not from a company table.
• Coca-Cola is a consumer-products enterprise, not a technology company, so there is no universal software-engineering ladder to benchmark against. Digital, data, engineering, supply-chain, scientific and commercial roles are distributed across functions and can be graded differently for the same nominal title.
• The Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer rows are deliberately absent from the band table. Their disclosed pay is a single worldwide figure, and interpolating a city factor onto it would produce an India-based chief executive salary that does not exist. Both are carried in the executive section instead.
• The senior vice president and executive vice president rows are excluded from the range chart because a $1.8 million and a $5.75 million package compress everything below them into a single line.
• The company has acquired and divested businesses and operates through a broad bottling system, but no public evidence supports a post-merger grade-harmonisation table. The correct treatment is not publicly disclosed rather than an invented legacy conversion.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Atlanta

Coca-Cola does not publish a public city office directory or a city-by-city employee table, so presence here is described as regional coverage rather than as an office listing. Cities appear because the research bundle evidences parent-company work in them, not because a headcount is disclosed.

Atlanta anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Atlanta column is the anchor and the only one with employer-published evidence. Four current Coca-Cola careers postings supply base ranges and annual-incentive reference percentages for the junior-buyer, consultant, senior-manager, director and senior-director bands.
• The vice-president and senior-vice-president anchors come from two SEC-filed employment letters disclosing a $358,000 job grade 18 base and a $490,000 job grade 19 base. The executive-vice-president anchor is a blend of four 2025 proxy Summary Compensation Table rows.
• Non-Atlanta figures are derived. No country outside the United States has a published Coca-Cola salary schedule, and the Glassdoor and 6figr samples used for calibration are small and may include bottler employees.
• Geographic compression is deliberate and level-dependent. Bangalore sits at 0.16 times the Atlanta base at Band 1 and rises to about 0.54 times at Band 10, because senior leadership is priced against a more global market than frontline work.
• The company discloses no city-level headcount, so no office here is ranked by employee count. Atlanta is identified as the global headquarters and the strongest disclosed H-1B worksite; the ranking among Gurgaon, Bangalore, London, Sydney, Dublin and Singapore is not public.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• At 31 December 2025 there were 36,210,321 securities outstanding under shareholder-approved compensation plans at a weighted-average option exercise price of $55.74, with 244,576,901 shares still available across the plans.
• The 2024 Equity Plan had used only about 4 percent of its authorised 240.0 million shares by the end of 2025, so plan capacity is not a constraint on grant policy in the near term.
• FY2025 stock-based compensation expense was $279 million against $47.941 billion of revenue, which is roughly 0.6 percent of revenue. That is an order of magnitude lower as a share of revenue than a large-cap technology issuer, and it is the clearest single indicator that equity is a narrow officer instrument here rather than a broad employee currency.
• Unrecognised stock compensation cost was $236 million at the FY2025 close, expected to be recognised over a weighted-average 1.7 years.
• The share-counting rule matters for anyone modelling dilution: a full-value award such as a restricted stock unit or performance share unit consumes three pool shares, while an option consumes one.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The four-year 25 percent schedule is the option pattern disclosed in the 2024 Equity Plan and confirmed by Henrique Braun's February 2026 grant of 453,189 options vesting in equal tranches in 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030, and by Manuel Arroyo's February 2025 grant of 93,878 options vesting from 2026 through 2029. Executive performance share units run on a different clock: a three-year performance and vesting period with settlement determined by the result, not by elapsed service. The global employee stock purchase plan match runs on a one-year clock and lapses proportionally if the purchased shares are sold first.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Equity at Coca-Cola is layered rather than binary. The global employee stock purchase plan can reach employees well below the standard long-term incentive population, selective retention restricted stock units bridge the gap in the middle of the ladder, and officers receive options and performance share units.
• Specialist evidence places selective Emerging Talent and retention restricted stock units around job grades 10 to 13 and standard long-term incentive eligibility around job grades 14 to 17. Neither threshold is a company disclosure, and the mapping from those grades onto job titles is role-specific.
• Research grant estimates by band run to zero at Bands 1 and 2, up to about $10,000 at Band 3, $0 to $35,000 at Bands 4 and 5, $15,000 to $90,000 at Bands 6 and 7, $100,000 to $450,000 at vice president, $0.3 million to $1.75 million at senior vice president and $1.5 million to $7 million at executive vice president. Only the executive rows are anchored on disclosed awards.
• One current senior-director posting carries a 20 percent long-term-incentive reference next to the base range, which is the only employer-published equity percentage found anywhere below officer level.
• Multiplying an option count by the current share price is not a valuation. Henrique Braun's 453,189 options at an $80.455 exercise price are worth their Black-Scholes grant-date fair value, not 453,189 times $91.64.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Atlanta

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $91.64 reference price at 26 August 2026 and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The 2025 table is the last one covering James Quincey as chief executive, so a full-year package for Henrique Braun will not be visible until the next proxy statement. His 2025 row is a chief operating officer package. The most useful comparison available today is that his disclosed chief executive base of $1.45 million sits 13.4 percent below Quincey's $1.675 million 2025 salary while carrying the same 200 percent incentive target, which is a conventional new-appointment discount rather than a change in pay philosophy.

Board compensation framework

A non-employee director with no chair role receives $290,000 a year, of which 69 percent is equity. That base package is roughly 5.4 times the modelled Atlanta frontline salary and about 1.7 times the modelled Atlanta senior-manager package, for a part-time governance role.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The executive calendar is the one part of the cycle with real visibility. Financial and strategic measures are set near the start of the performance year, the Talent and Compensation Committee evaluates results after year-end generally in February, annual incentives are generally paid in March, and annual long-term incentive grants are typically made in February. Options generally vest over four years and performance share units generally run three-year cycles. The disclosed executive scorecard covers company financial performance, operational measures, strategic objectives and organisation and culture contributions.

Dataset summary

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The Executive Chairman and the Chief Executive Officer rows are deliberately absent from the band table. Their disclosed pay is one worldwide figure that is identical in every city, so interpolating a geographic factor onto it would force every location's factor toward 1.0 at the top of the ladder and produce nonsense such as an India-based chief executive base. Both are carried in the executive section instead, and the band ladder stops at executive vice president with a seniority scale of 1 to 10.
2. 2Base and total calibration factors are identical for every city. The source model applies a single market factor to base, incentive and equity alike, so there is no evidence for a separate total-compensation factor and inventing one would imply a calibration the bundle does not contain. In reality equity granted in dollars usually compresses less than local base pay, so the offshore total figures here are more likely to be understated than overstated at senior levels.
3. 3Only one research bundle exists for this company, so there are no cross-bundle disagreements to reconcile. The trade-off is that no figure here has been corroborated by a second independent model.
4. 4The source model computes total compensation as base plus target incentive plus estimated equity and adds no employer benefit load, so nothing had to be stripped. Superannuation, provident fund, social insurance and the 401(k) match are therefore excluded from every total in the band table, and the Australian 12 percent superannuation guarantee in particular is a material amount that sits outside these figures.
5. 5The Band 1 frontline row is anchored on current parent-company postings, but most frontline production and distribution work in the Coca-Cola system belongs to independent bottlers. The row should be read as parent-company operations roles only, and it is a small population.
6. 6Every equity value below vice president is a research estimate. Coca-Cola discloses no grant table, no per-grade value and no eligibility threshold, and the only employer-published equity percentage found anywhere below officer level is a 20 percent long-term-incentive reference on one senior-director posting.
7. 7The named-executive incentive targets for the chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and North America president are derived arithmetic, not disclosed figures. Each is the paid amount divided by the disclosed 150 percent company factor and then by the reported salary, and salaries that changed mid-year make the resulting percentage approximate.
8. 8No H-1B city table is presented because city-level percentiles and FY2025 petition counts were not exposed in the accessible summaries. With 20 filings in the fiscal year, a city breakdown would have been fragile even if it had been available.
9. 9Country calibration factors rest on small Glassdoor and 6figr samples that may include bottler employees. Auckland and Dubai carry benchmark factors with no company-specific observation at all, so they are a further grade less reliable than the other markets.
10. 10Henrique Braun's full-year 2026 chief executive package will not exist in public until the next proxy statement, so the only 2026 figures available are a $1.45 million base, a 200 percent target and the February 2026 option grant.

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 — 15 sources

The 5.5 percent decline sits alongside rising revenue and raised guidance, which is the signature of portfolio reshaping rather than cost cutting. The company publishes no city-level employee table and no global attrition rate, so the only geographic signal in the filings is the United States and non-United States split. The heavy non-United States weighting is also what drives the pay ratio: the disclosed median employee is a part-time United Kingdom retail worker, not an Atlanta professional.