How Costco Pays

Warehouse ladder — W0 through W2

Warehouse leadership — W3 through W6

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Costco has no public universal band code. Warehouse careers are organised by job title, wage scale and accumulated hours; official US IT postings use numbered job levels such as Software Engineer 1, 2 and 3; and executive titles appear only through SEC filings. Any grade code you see attached to Costco, including the W and C codes used here, is an outside construction.
• The published national wage scale is the real ladder for about 95 percent of the workforce. The FY2025 10-K records a starting wage of at least $20.00 an hour in the United States and Canada from March 2025, a top of scale that rose by a dollar, and an average US hourly rate of approximately $32.00 at year end. Reuters reported the underlying three-year path: $30.20 an hour at top of scale in year one, then $1.00 more in each of the next two years.
• About 18,000 US employees are covered by a Teamsters national agreement whose tentative terms were reached on 1 February 2025 and averted a threatened strike. The negotiated scale is administered separately from the national wage book and its detail is not published, so a represented warehouse can differ from the national anchors in this report on rates, premiums and step timing.
• Promotion into leadership is overwhelmingly internal. Costco states that it promotes from within, and 7,500 hourly employees completed its six-week Supervisor in Training programme in FY2025, which is the practical gateway from the clerk and specialist bands into W3.
• Nothing in this ladder is an entitlement above the wage scale. There is no published bonus target for any non-executive band, no published minimum grade for a restricted stock unit grant, and no published time-in-band or promotion-increase table.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Issaquah

Costco discloses warehouse counts by country but never city-level headcount, so no market in this table carries a population figure. The country footprint runs 629 warehouses in the United States, 110 in Canada, 42 in Mexico, 37 in Japan, 29 in the United Kingdom, 20 in South Korea, 15 in Australia, 14 in Taiwan, 7 in China, 5 in Spain, 2 each in France and Sweden and 1 each in Iceland and New Zealand. France, Sweden and Iceland are in the footprint but carry no pay evidence in the bundle and are therefore not calibrated here.

Issaquah anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Issaquah is the anchor because it is the corporate headquarters and the market where every class of evidence resolves at once: audited wage disclosures, official job postings, proxy tables and third-party technical packages.
• US city factors are cost-of-labour adjustments around the national wage book, not Costco pay zones. Costco publishes no geographic differential, and the $20.00 starting wage applied nationally, so the US spread from 0.94 in Dallas to 1.15 in the San Francisco Bay Area lands mostly on the upper scale and on management pay.
• International factors are country factors with a city adjustment on top. The country warehouse factors run 0.78 for Canada, 0.63 for New Zealand, 0.62 for Australia, 0.56 for the United Kingdom, 0.43 for South Korea, 0.42 for Japan, 0.41 for Spain, 0.34 for China, 0.30 for Taiwan and 0.27 for Mexico.
• Where a market has direct local evidence, that evidence overrides the country factor. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and Taiwan all carry role-level anchors from Glassdoor, SEEK, Indeed, Reuters and the 104 Job Bank; South Korea, Mexico, Spain, China and New Zealand are carried on flat country factors because no role-level Costco record was located.
• Hyderabad is deliberately absent. The reported India presence is a technology and research capability centre initially planned for about 1,000 employees, not a warehouse operation, so it has no warehouse population for this ladder to price.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Just under 40 percent of the original 2019 authorisation remained available at FY2025 year end, six and a half years into the plan, which implies a further run of several years at the current grant rate before shareholders are asked for more.
• Outstanding awards are overwhelmingly time-based: 2,187,000 of the 2,308,121 units outstanding, or 94.8 percent. The 121,000 performance-based units are primarily executive awards.
• FY2025 activity was net negative on the outstanding balance: 1,095,000 units granted against 1,494,000 vested or delivered and 92,000 forfeited.
• The weighted average grant-date fair value of $883.46 per unit means a $25,000 modelled manager grant is roughly 28 units, and the chief executive's 13,834-unit award is worth about $13.24 million at the $957.25 report-date share price against $12.04 million at grant.

2019 Stock Incentive Plan inventory at FY2025 year end

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The three-year schedule above is what a new grantee receives. Grantees eligible under the legacy arrangement could elect instead a five-year schedule vesting 20 percent a year, which carries an acceleration provision that the three-year schedule does not: 33 percent, 66 percent and 100 percent acceleration on reaching 25, 30 and 35 years of service. That is a rare and explicit link between tenure and vesting, and it is the reason a long-serving Costco manager may hold a materially different equity position from a recent external hire at the same level. Named executive performance units run a one-year performance test and then generally vest 20 percent a year over five anniversaries; non-employee director units vest one third on each of the first three anniversaries.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• W0 to W3: no standard grant was found. The Employee Stock Purchase Plan may be available in the United States, but restricted stock unit eligibility is not publicly indicated for the warehouse individual contributor and supervisor population.
• W4: no standard grant was found, and any value is discretionary and not public. A modelled $0 to $10,000 signal exists in third-party data and should not be treated as guaranteed.
• W5 to W6: eligibility is plausible on the strength of the position-eligibility language in the award agreement, with a modelled $5,000 to $75,000 annual or periodic grant. The agreement permits vesting to stop or reduce after a move into a less-eligible role, which makes an internal transfer a real equity risk.
• C1 to C3: no standard grant was found; third-party records show small stock components in some IT packages, at $0 to $7,500, and these are package-specific rather than a company-wide entitlement.
• C4 to M1: eligibility is plausible with a modelled $3,000 to $30,000 grant; D1 to VP runs $25,000 to $850,000, entirely discretionary and position-dependent.
• EVP and CEO: fully disclosed. FY2025 awards ran $3,670,902 to $12,036,800 of grant-date value, granted on 22 October 2025 with a one-year performance test.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Issaquah

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $957.25 reference price at 2026-08-26 and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Pierre Riel is the disclosed international operating executive and is therefore the closest public proxy for a regional head outside North America, at a $5,287,017 FY2025 total. Russ Miller was the US and Mexico operating executive for FY2025, retired in February 2026 and was succeeded by Caton Frates as Senior EVP, Warehouse Operations for the US and Mexico; individual FY2026 compensation for that role will not appear until a later proxy. James C. Klauer, EVP and COO for the Northern Division, appears in the Form 4 record but not in the compensation tables, which shows how much of the operating executive layer is invisible in the proxy.

Board compensation framework

Director pay is 88 percent equity by design, a higher equity weight than the chief executive's own salary-to-stock relationship implies, and the three-year director vesting schedule matches the standard employee schedule rather than running on a shorter cycle.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The observable mechanism is a wage scale. Regular increases are linked to accumulated hours worked, so a part-time employee moves up the same scale as a full-time employee but takes longer in calendar time to get there. Promotion into leadership is filled internally: Costco states that it promotes from within, and 7,500 hourly employees completed the six-week Supervisor in Training programme in FY2025. On the executive side the calendar is precise: the Compensation Committee reviews in the autumn, annual restricted stock unit grants are generally dated 22 October, and eligible bonuses have historically been paid in November.

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. 1One ladder is priced here, deliberately. The research bundle carries sixteen research bands covering warehouse, corporate technology and executive populations, but its location factors are two different sets: a warehouse factor and a corporate factor that differ by up to sixteen points in the same city, for example 0.27 against 0.43 in Mexico City and 0.42 against 0.60 in Japan. Because every international market in the footprint is a warehouse market, this report prices the warehouse ladder W0 to W6 and carries the corporate and technology ladder C1 to D1 in the career levels and variable pay sections instead. Applying warehouse factors to a corporate engineer would misstate whole markets.
2. 2The executive bands are excluded from the priced ladder for the same reason. Named executive pay is a single worldwide US proxy figure; folding it in as the most senior band would force every international market's interpolated factor toward parity with the United States at the top and produce absurd cells such as an international division head on a US chief executive salary. The ladder therefore stops at warehouse general manager with a seniority of 9, and the executive figures are carried in the executive section only.
3. 3Hyderabad is excluded from the location table. The reported India presence is a technology and research capability centre with no warehouse population, so the bundle records no warehouse compensation for it at all. Bangalore, Singapore and Dubai appear in the bundle as disabled references with no evidenced Costco operation and are likewise absent here.
4. 4Notional benefit loading has been stripped from every total. The research bundle built its total compensation figures by adding estimated employer benefits on top of cash and equity, which inflated them by roughly 10 to 15 percent. Every total on this page is rebuilt as base plus variable plus equity so that it reconciles by addition, which is why each one sits below the bundle's own figure for the same band.
5. 5Taiwan carries an unresolved anchor conflict. The bundle's country warehouse factor for Taiwan is 0.30, but its Taipei general manager anchor of NT$5.0 million implies about 0.87 of the Issaquah anchor at that band, which is inconsistent with every other Taiwanese band and with the country factor. Taipei is therefore carried flat at 0.44 and 0.45 with no top-of-ladder interpolation, and the general manager anchor is treated as a low-confidence outlier.
6. 6Only one research bundle exists for Costco, so no cross-bundle reconciliation was possible and no figure on this page is corroborated by a second independent compilation. Where the bundle itself carries two windows for the same measure, such as 87 FY2026 labour condition applications against 126 Issaquah filings, both are shown separately rather than combined.
7. 7France, Sweden and Iceland are in the FY2025 warehouse footprint with two, two and one warehouses respectively, but the bundle records no pay evidence for them and they are not calibrated here.
8. 8No fiscal year end date and no founding year appear anywhere in the bundle, so neither is stated in this report's metadata.

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 7.9 percent over two years while the median employee figure fell and then partly recovered, which reflects the part-time share of new hiring rather than a fall in hourly rates: the average US hourly rate rose to approximately $32.00 across the same period. Costco does not publish a quarterly attrition percentage and instead reports approximately 94 percent retention in the United States and Canada among employees with at least one year of service.