How Conagra Brands Pays

Plant and entry ladder — B1 through B2

Professional and technical ladder — B3 through B6

Leadership ladder — B7 through B10

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Conagra discloses titles and role-specific posted salary ranges but no universal numeric grade table, so B1 to B10 is a transparent normalization that creates comparability without pretending to be an official Conagra taxonomy.
• Seven official indexed postings anchor the ladder with real ranges, running from $59,000 to $79,000 for associates up to $157,000 to $241,000 for a senior director; some of those postings were already filled by the report date.
• The mapping is most reliable for finance, engineering, supply-chain and analytics roles and least reliable for sales, marketing and plant-management roles, where equivalent scope may be placed differently.
• The 2018 Pinnacle Foods acquisition creates plausible legacy-title differences, but no reviewed public source describes a formal band-harmonization programme, so no legacy grade overlay is claimed.
• The July and August 2026 organisational changes simplify reporting lines and consolidate HR and communications under a chief administrative officer, but they do not establish a new compensation architecture.
• The executive vice-president and chief-executive rows are United States consolidated proxy disclosures and are deliberately excluded from the modeled band table, because applying a city calibration factor to them would produce a fictitious local executive salary.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Chicago

Conagra does not publish city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank sites by employee count. It lists only markets with an evidenced employing entity: eight bundle locations that existed purely as selector placeholders, including Hyderabad, Sydney, London, Amsterdam, Auckland, Singapore and Dubai, are excluded because no current Conagra employer of record was verified in them.

Chicago anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Chicago column is the anchor. B2 through B8 come from seven official indexed Conagra postings, which are United States corporate roles normalized to the Chicago headquarters rather than city-tagged by the employer.
• Omaha is described in official careers material as Conagra's largest workforce and carries the corporate services, research and development, IT, HR, global business services and supply-chain populations, yet is calibrated 5 percent below Chicago.
• B1 is the only row calibrated against a company disclosure rather than a posting: the FY2026 median employee was a United States production technician on $56,163, which includes overtime and premiums that the straight-time anchor here excludes.
• The single Canadian anchor is an official Consumer Insights Manager posting at C$81,000 to C$119,000, which is consistent with the 0.70 Mississauga factor at the B5 band.
• The executive vice-president and chief-executive rows are not in this table. They are United States consolidated proxy values and are carried in the executive section instead, so no city factor is ever applied to them.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 2023 Stock Plan opened with a 17.4 million share base reserve. The 2024 Form 10-K disclosed 14.9 million shares then available for new awards, but no reviewed 2026 source provides a current balance, so plan utilisation for 2026 is unresolved.
• Executive stock ownership guidelines are six times salary for the chief executive, four times for the chief financial and chief operating officers and three times for other named executives. Executives below their guideline generally retain 75 percent of net shares after vesting, which materially reduces how much of a grant can be sold in the early years.
• The single most useful equity fact for a Conagra employee is the FY2024 to FY2026 performance-share result of 35.7 percent of target. A grant headline value is not a payout, and a three-year cycle can lose roughly two thirds of its target value on operating results alone.
• Broad-based participation is permitted but not evidenced. The plan allows awards to employees generally, while every recurring grant disclosed in the reviewed filings sits at named-executive level, so no minimum band, standard grant matrix or participation rate can be quoted.

Equity plan capacity and FY2026 grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Disclosed executive restricted stock units generally vest one third annually over three years, which is why this report shows a three-year schedule rather than the four-year cadence common in technology. Performance shares are a single three-year cycle settled on certification, with a relative total shareholder return modifier applied to the operating result. Non-executive vesting terms are award-specific and are not published.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The 2023 Stock Plan permits awards to employees, non-employee directors and qualifying consultants selected by the administrator. That is an eligibility ceiling, not a grant policy, and Conagra publishes no minimum grade for a recurring award.
• Recurring grant evidence is concentrated at the named-executive layer. Below that, this report models a long-term incentive from about $50,000 at B6 to $500,000 at B10, and those figures are planning envelopes rather than entitlements.
• At B1 to B5 the only evidenced equity route is the employee stock purchase plan, whose discount and windows are not published. Assume no recurring grant at those bands unless an offer letter says otherwise.
• The one-time chief-executive awards show how Conagra uses equity in a transition: $4 million of price-hurdled units at $20, $25 and $30 plus $2 million of time-vested units, rather than a larger cash sign-on.
• A candidate negotiating at B6 and above should ask three questions the filings cannot answer: whether the role carries an annual grant at all, whether it is restricted stock units or performance shares, and what the target grant value is as a percentage of base.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Chicago

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $14.83 reference price at 22 July 2026 Form 4 reference price and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The four disclosed executive vice presidents earned $3.11 million to $4.28 million for FY2026 on salaries of $659,000 to $860,000, so between 78 and 80 percent of each package came from incentive and stock rather than salary. Annual incentive targets sat at 100 percent of salary for the chief financial and chief operating officers and 90 percent for the business-unit and supply-chain executives. Grant-date stock values clustered tightly at $2.240 million for the two most senior officers and $1.613 million for the other two, which suggests a small number of executive grant tiers rather than individually negotiated award sizes.

Board compensation framework

A standard independent director package is about $285,000 a year in cash and equity, and the independent chair's equity retainer alone is $460,000. This is a governance package rather than an employment band, and it is deliberately excluded from the band table and the range chart.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Executive goal setting is the one documented part of the process: a financial scorecard of adjusted operating profit at 50 percent, net sales at 30 percent and free cash flow at 20 percent, with an individual modifier applied afterwards. That design is specific to the executive annual incentive plan and cannot be generalised to non-executive reviews. Benefits and pay also vary by location and role, and overtime and collective-bargaining status can change plant compensation materially without any review event 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. 1The executive vice-president and chief-executive rows are deliberately excluded from the band table. They are United States consolidated proxy disclosures, and applying a city calibration factor to them would produce a fictitious Mexico City or Mississauga executive salary. Those figures are carried in full in the executive section instead, and the modeled ladder stops at B10.
2. 2Total compensation is rebuilt from components. The bundle's own printed total-compensation cells do not reconcile with its own modeled equity table at several bands, notably B9 where the printed total of $397,000 leaves room for only about $12,000 of long-term incentive against a modeled range starting at $150,000. Every total here is base plus target annual incentive plus modeled annualized equity, which puts B6, B8, B9 and B10 above the bundle's printed figures.
3. 3No employer benefit load is included in any total. Medical, retirement and other employer costs are employer expense rather than pay and are described qualitatively in the benefits section only.
4. 4The source bundle disagrees with itself on B5 equity: its band table shows a modeled $25,000 to $75,000 long-term incentive while its structured data marks B5 as having no recurring grant. This report takes the more conservative reading and shows zero equity at B5, with the first modeled grant appearing at B6.
5. 5The B1 anchor is straight-time only. Overtime, shift premiums, craft rates and collectively bargained plant scales are excluded, which is why the $44,290 modeled B1 total sits below the $56,163 disclosed median employee whose figure includes those elements. No negotiated wage scale is published, so none is presented.
6. 6City factors are applied flat across the ladder because no level-dependent geographic compression is evidenced in any source. No location carries a separate senior-band factor, and none should be inferred.
7. 7Eight locations in the source bundle existed only as interface placeholders with no evidenced employing entity, including Hyderabad, Sydney, London, Amsterdam, Auckland, Singapore and Dubai. They are dropped here rather than shown with modeled pay, and the India row is discussed in the nuances rather than priced.
8. 8The two visa aggregators disagree on both counts and averages, and the conflict is left flagged rather than resolved by averaging or by preferring one source.
9. 9Conagra discloses no geographic revenue split in the reviewed sources, so no regional revenue panel is shown.
10. 10Founding year and fiscal-year-end day were not stated in the reviewed bundle beyond the FY2026 Form 10-K period ending 31 May 2026, so the metadata line carries only what the filings support.

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 — 22 sources

The pay-ratio population has fallen by 1,736 people, or 9.2 percent, across three disclosure years, and the median employee's compensation has fallen 16.1 percent from $66,966 to $56,163 over the same period. Those are determination-date populations and a selected employee that can change each year, so this is not a same-worker wage series and it is not evidence of a pay cut. No verified salary freeze, company-wide increase percentage or hiring-offer revision was located, and restructuring accounting in the filings is not equivalent to a salary policy.