How Copart Pays

Frontline operations ladder — C1 to C2

Professional and management ladder — C3 to C9

Executive titles — C10 to C11

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• C1 to C11 is an analytical framework, not an official Copart grading scheme. No public source identifies a Copart grade name, a band minimum or a band midpoint anywhere in the organisation.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for the technology and finance roles in Dallas, where job postings and salary submissions are dense, and progressively less reliable for yard, title, dispatch, sales and country-leadership roles.
• Executive career biographies are the strongest evidence that the layers exist. The chief operating officer began as an assistant general manager and the chief technology officer progressed from manager to director, senior director and vice president before the C-suite.
• No public source identifies a legacy band structure inherited from an acquisition or a company-wide band harmonisation programme, so the report does not present one.
• C12 in the source research, covering the chief executive, executive chairman and outside directors, is not carried as a band row. It has no disclosed salary range and a single worldwide executive figure would distort every city column.
• The frontline rows describe an hourly operations population that exists in Copart's yard countries. India and the three benchmark-only cities have no Copart yards, so their C1 and C2 cells price local entry professional and business-process work instead.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Dallas

Copart publishes a facility count but no employee count by site or by country beyond the 64 percent United States split, so this catalogue cannot rank offices by headcount. The United Kingdom has the largest disclosed non-United States operating footprint; Canada, Brazil, Germany and Spain each have multiple facilities.

Dallas anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Dallas column is the anchor. C1 through C4 and C6 use observed Copart role anchors, C5 and C7 through C10 are modelled, and C11 uses disclosed executive salaries.
• Copart's disclosed employee countries are the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Finland, Germany and Spain, with India included in the proxy's employee population.
• Australia, New Zealand and Singapore are not disclosed employee countries. They are carried as market benchmarks for comparison and are labelled as such in every row; a buyer-facing website is not evidence of local employment.
• India is the only market where the gap to Dallas narrows with seniority, from about 10 percent of the anchor base at C1 to about 39 percent at C11. Every other market carries a flat factor because the underlying research modelled it that way.
• Hyderabad is the strongest observed Indian city signal, spanning roughly 2.8 lakh to 23 lakh rupees across junior to senior technology reports. Bangalore applies a 7 percent labour-market premium to Hyderabad and no current Copart facility there was verified.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Copart publishes share reserves, availability and annual movements but never a simple pool utilisation percentage. Different award types, exercised awards, cancellations and treasury accounting make a single ratio misleading, so this report shows the disclosed counts instead of inventing one.
• Simple 2007 plan availability was 45.3 percent at 31 July 2025, calculated as 20,577,321 shares available against 45,431,198 reserved. That is a capacity measure, not outstanding dilution.
• Nine-month FY2026 company-wide activity was 596,000 restricted awards granted alongside 746,000 time-based options and 75,000 market-condition options. The recipient bands behind those counts are not disclosed.
• Stock-based compensation expense was $29.013 million for the nine months to 30 April 2026, which against roughly 11,600 employees is a small figure by technology-company standards and is consistent with a selective rather than a broad-based grant model.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The August 2026 senior executive awards are the clearest public vesting evidence Copart has ever provided. Restricted stock units vest 20 percent on the first anniversary and then one twentieth of the award each quarter to year five. Options vest 20 percent on the first anniversary and then one sixtieth each month to year five. Five years is materially longer than the four-year pattern common in technology and points to retention rather than annual refresh as the design intent.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The employee stock purchase plan is the only equity channel with published eligibility. It is open to eligible employees of Copart and designated subsidiaries, subject to jurisdiction rules, and can be sized by the employee.
• Discretionary awards under the 2007 plan are the selective channel. Copart publishes no minimum eligible grade, no standard grant size and no grant frequency, so no reader should assume that reaching a level triggers a grant.
• On the C1 to C4 rows there is no public evidence of routine discretionary grants at all, which is why the equity column on those rows is zero rather than a small estimate.
• Portions of the 2026 executive option grants carry a market hurdle: 279,000 of Jane Pocock's 500,000 options and 114,400 of Leah Stearns's 200,000 require the share price to be at or above 125 percent of the $31.61 exercise price, roughly $39.51, both at exercise and for each of the twenty preceding trading days.
• Outside directors receive an annual option worth $250,000 at grant, which is substantially larger than the $57,500 cash retainer and makes their pay more equity-weighted than most employees' pay.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Dallas

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $33.39 reference price at 26 August 2026 market snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Liaw's transition terms are disclosed and are worth reading as a template for Copart senior exits: a $450,000 lump sum, $200,000 across the transition period, FY2026 bonus treatment, twenty hours of private-aircraft use, continued equity vesting, waiver or modification of certain prior award restrictions, and a potential $250,000 post-employment payment alongside option-exercise extensions and accelerated vesting, all subject to agreement conditions. Adair's $1 FY2025 salary is a deliberate structure rather than an accounting quirk: his economic interest sits entirely in legacy equity and his ownership stake, and his 2024 open-market sales realised more than $66 million across two transactions.

Board compensation framework

The board programme is equity-dominant by design: the $250,000 annual option is more than four times the $57,500 cash retainer, so a director's realised pay depends on the share price in a way that no ordinary Copart employee's does. It also introduces grant-timing volatility into the reported director totals, exactly as it does for executives.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The only disclosed pay actions in FY2025 are at the top: no salary increase for the chief executive and a 3 percent merit increase for the chief financial officer. A 3 percent executive merit increase is a useful, if narrow, signal of Copart's general posture on base-pay movement, but it is one data point about one person and should not be generalised into a company merit budget. Mid-year corrections and off-cycle increases are not 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. 1Only one research bundle exists for Copart, so no cross-bundle reconciliation was possible. Where the bundle itself carries two conflicting figures, both are preserved: the FY2026 H-1B median appears as $142,526 in one snapshot and $138,763 in an alternate refresh of the same source, and Levels.fyi's $105,000 United States software engineer median sits materially below Glassdoor's self-reported estimate for the same role.
2. 2The C12 row from the source research, covering the chief executive, executive chairman and outside directors, is deliberately excluded from the band table. It carries no disclosed salary range at all, and a single worldwide executive figure at the top of the ladder would force every city factor towards 1.0 and produce absurd offshore cells. That population is carried in the executive section instead, and the band ladder therefore tops out at C11.
3. 3The source research computed total compensation as base plus variable plus an 8 to 12 percent employer benefit load. That load is employer cost rather than pay, so it has been stripped here and every total is rebuilt from its own components. Totals in this report are therefore consistently lower than the source tables, by roughly 8 to 12 percent at every level.
4. 4Copart runs a large hourly yard population alongside a small corporate centre, and the two are genuinely different labour markets. The city factors were checked in both directions before the two were kept on one ladder: they move the same way in every verified market, with the United Kingdom flat at 0.56 to 0.78 and Canada flat at 0.70 to 0.78 across the frontline and professional rows alike, so no reversal was found. The frontline rows are nonetheless grouped separately and the median-employee figure is carried in the key metrics so that neither population is read through the other.
5. 5India is the only market with level-dependent compression, running from about 10 percent of the Dallas base at C1 to about 39 percent at C11. The report interpolates that linearly by seniority, which slightly overstates the mid-ladder Indian cells against the source model's own convex curve; the C3 Indian base in particular reads above the bundle's observed 11.5 lakh rupee median.
6. 6Equity is zero on every row from C1 to C10 because no routine grant is evidenced at any of those layers. That is an absence of disclosure rather than a positive finding of no equity, and it means the modelled totals at C7 to C10 will understate any executive who does hold discretionary awards.
7. 7Bangalore, Sydney, Auckland and Singapore carry no verified Copart employee presence. They are retained because the source research modelled them, and they are labelled benchmark-only in every row rather than quietly removed.
8. 8Copart's current chief executive package is not disclosed. The executive section therefore presents the FY2025 disclosure for Jeffrey Liaw as the latest completed chief executive record and separates it from A. Jayson Adair's FY2025 Executive Chairman pay, which is a different role in the same year.
9. 9No company-wide 2026 salary increase percentage, pay freeze, salary cut or off-cycle correction was identified in any source, and no standardised attrition rate exists, so the 0.9 percent FY2025 headcount decline is reported without a cause.

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 — 20 sources

Two years of very different shapes: a 1,500-person expansion in FY2024 followed by a flat FY2025. The international share has risen in each of the three years, from 32 percent to 36 percent, which is consistent with the European and Gulf operating footprint growing faster than the United States yard network. Copart publishes no city-level or country-level headcount, so that split is the only geographic workforce signal in the filings.

Revenue and workforce distribution

The United States produces about 83 percent of revenue with 64 percent of the workforce, which is the clearest quantitative statement of where value is concentrated inside Copart. It also means the international operations are more labour-intensive per dollar of revenue than the domestic network, a useful piece of context when interpreting the lower city factors outside North America.