How CVS Health Pays

Professional and clinical ladder — CVS-P1 through CVS-P2

Management and principal ladder — CVS-M1 through CVS-D2

Executive ladder — CVS-E1 through CVS-E3

Named executive officers — 2026 proxy disclosure

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The 2023 CVS Health Corporation Severance Plan is the only public evidence of grade architecture. It groups non-store United States employees into four tiers built from parallel families 104 to 113, 206 to 215, 306 to 313 and 407 to 413, plus Executive Tier 1 grades 36A to 36E and 70G and Executive Tier 2 grades 38A to 38C, 39A to 39B, 71G and 72G.
• Those repeated numeric series point to legacy or business-specific grade systems inherited from Caremark, Aetna and the retail entity rather than one enterprise sequence. The filing discloses no titles, salary minima, maxima, bonus targets or equity eligibility for any grade.
• Anonymous employee discussions sometimes associate grade 108 with Senior Analyst and grade 110 with Senior Manager. Those observations are directional and are not used here as official mappings.
• The severance plan expressly excludes store employees, the chief executive and every employee outside the United States, so the grade families do not describe the retail population at all.
• Vice President, Senior Vice President, Executive Vice President and Group President are corporate titles rather than published grade numbers, and this report treats them as title tiers.
• The CVS-E4 and CVS-E5 rows are proxy accounting values for six named individuals in one fiscal year. They are excluded from the range chart and should not be read as a pay band that anyone can be hired into.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Woonsocket

CVS publishes no city-level headcount, so this catalogue cannot rank sites by employees. Woonsocket is the corporate headquarters, Hartford is the principal Aetna location, Scottsdale and Northbrook are Caremark centres, and Richardson, Buffalo Grove, Woonsocket and Scottsdale are the four worksites with visible H-1B wage records. Ireland's 165 employees centre on Galway. Spain, Canada and Bermuda together account for 24 people and are not priced.

Woonsocket anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Woonsocket column is the anchor at a factor of 1.00. Its medians are the national posting envelope from official CVS requisitions sampled in August 2026, cross-checked against Levels.fyi and Glassdoor rather than derived from any CVS pay schedule.
• The eleven US city factors are transparent modeling inputs, not CVS-published geographic differentials. They run from 0.95 in Pittsburgh and Nashville to 1.23 in New York, and CVS states no location adjustment anywhere in the reviewed sources.
• Galway is the only non-US market with both a disclosed headcount and live official postings. Its factors come from converting the observed euro ranges at 0.8571 and dividing by the anchor medians: about 0.76 on base and 0.75 on total for professional and mid-management scope.
• The US factors are flat across the ladder because the bundle evidences no level-dependent compression, so no top-of-ladder factors are set on any location. Ireland is likewise flat: its four observed posting ratios are 0.77, 0.76, 0.85 and 0.70 with no monotonic trend by level.
• The CVS-E4 and CVS-E5 rows are single worldwide proxy figures for named officers. Any city factor applied to them produces a comparison artefact rather than a local range, and both rows are excluded from the range chart for that reason.
• Spain, Canada and Bermuda are verified but have 15, 8 and 1 employees respectively and no location or salary evidence, so they are described here rather than given a fabricated factor in the location table.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• A precise utilisation percentage cannot be calculated. The 31.0 million figure is itself an estimate combining newly authorised and expected carryover shares, and no common measurement date for granted, forfeited, recycled and outstanding shares is published. The defensible public conclusion is that the reserve is disclosed and the utilisation rate is not determinable.
• The plan's individual award limit of up to 3 million shares of each award type in a fiscal year is a governance ceiling, not a grant target. Nothing close to it appears in any 2025 or 2026 grant.
• Nonemployee director compensation under the plan is capped at $750,000 a year, plus up to $500,000 for an independent chair or lead independent director. The ordinary 2026 to 2027 retainer is $375,000, so the cap is double the actual practice.
• Because approximately 96 percent of the workforce receives no annual award in a typical year, equity is a source of pay dispersion at CVS rather than a component of a standard package.

Equity plan capacity and participation

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

From 31 March 2026 new time-based restricted stock units and options vest ratably over three years for all participants, replacing the previous four-year ratable schedule. Awards granted before that date continue on their original terms, so two vesting regimes run in parallel for the next few years. Performance share units settle on a multi-year cycle after committee certification rather than ratably, and covered executives must hold vested performance share shares for a further year.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• There is no published minimum grade for equity eligibility. The plan grants awards to officers, employees and selected nonemployee directors at the committee's discretion, and CVS explicitly describes eligibility as a committee decision rather than a title rule.
• The 12,000-recipient disclosure with more than 11,700 below vice president is the only hard number on breadth. It confirms that equity reaches well below the executive layer while remaining a small fraction of the workforce.
• Frontline retail and pharmacy roles are not described as receiving annual awards in any official source, and the modeled grant value for those bands is nil.
• Modeled annual grant values by band, which are page inputs rather than CVS guidelines, run $0 to $5,000 at analyst, $0 to $10,000 at senior professional, $5,000 to $20,000 at manager, $10,000 to $35,000 at senior manager, $20,000 to $75,000 at director, $40,000 to $125,000 at lead director, $75,000 to $200,000 at executive director, $100,000 to $500,000 at vice president and $500,000 to $4.0 million at senior vice president.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Woonsocket

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $92.9 reference price at 25 August 2026 close and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Thomas Cowhey's 2025 row is a departure package rather than a performance outcome: $420,833 of part-year salary, no non-equity incentive at all, $5.5 million of grant-date equity and $791,235 of other compensation. Samrat Khichi as General Counsel and Amy Compton-Phillips as Chief Clinical Officer are executive officers who did not qualify as named executives for 2025, so no compensation table exists for them and their pay is visible only through their 31 March 2026 Form 4 grants of 12,531 restricted stock units plus 80,838 options and 5,569 restricted stock units plus 35,928 options respectively.

Board compensation framework

The stock-weighted retainer is the notable design feature: at least three-quarters of a $375,000 package is delivered in CVS shares, so director pay moves with the same share price that drives executive performance share outcomes. Fernando Aguirre's 32,000-share sale across 20 and 21 May 2026 for about $3.0 million is the visible consequence of years of stock-settled retainers.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

For executives the cycle is explicit: goals, metrics and target opportunities are set between January and March; financial, operating, strategic and individual performance is monitored through the year; the committee receives a formal performance review and outlook around September; and results are certified with payouts determined in the following January to March window. Annual cash and long-term equity use separately defined measures, so a strong cash year does not imply a strong performance share cycle.

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 frontline hourly population is deliberately excluded from the priced band table. The research bundle's CVS-A1 store associate band at $31,200 to $52,832 and CVS-A2 pharmacy technician band at $34,320 to $60,424 are set against state and local wage floors, which move independently of the corporate posting index used for the professional ladder, so folding them into one interpolated set of city factors would misstate whole markets. Their disclosed hourly ranges are carried in the career levels, key metrics and news sections instead.
2. 2The research bundle computes total compensation as base plus variable plus a notional employer benefit load of roughly 8 to 15 percent. That is employer cost rather than pay, so every total here has been rebuilt as base plus target incentive plus annual equity and no longer matches the bundle's published totals.
3. 3The bundle's structured data file records the chief executive's 2025 non-equity incentive as $4,695,900, which leaves its component rows $1,000 short of the stated $21,214,084 total. The report narrative gives $4.696 million, which reconciles exactly, so $4,696,900 is used here.
4. 4Ellis and H1BGrader report 2025 H-1B medians of $137,095 and $144,656 respectively. Both are retained with their methodology noted rather than averaged into a figure neither source supports.
5. 5The CVS-E4 and CVS-E5 rows are proxy accounting values for named individuals rather than pay bands, and both are excluded from the range chart. Because no top-of-ladder city factors are set anywhere in this report, no interpolation runs between the employee bands and those rows, but any city factor applied to them still produces a comparison artefact rather than a local range.
6. 6Spain, Canada and Bermuda are verified footprints with 15, 8 and 1 employees but no location or salary evidence. They are described in the operations and benefits copy rather than given a fabricated factor in the location table, which is why the table shows 13 markets rather than 16.
7. 7Dublin carries the same factors as Galway because the only published Irish ranges are country-level. It is an Ireland-level envelope, not a Dublin-specific band, and it is a grade less reliable than the Galway row.
8. 8Equity values by band are recipient-conditional midpoints of the bundle's modeled grant ranges, not expected values across the band. Because roughly 96 percent of colleagues receive no annual award, the typical package at CVS-M1 through CVS-D2 contains no equity at all.
9. 9India, Australia, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates appear in the original research brief but have no verified material CVS payroll, so no factor, band or benefit matrix is published for any of them. Legacy Aetna International presence is not evidence of a current CVS payroll.
10. 10No enterprise-wide 2026 salary increase percentage, pay freeze, salary cut or off-cycle correction was located in any reviewed source, and no company-wide attrition figure exists, so neither can be shown even as a trend.

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 — 18 sources

CVS states a workforce above 300,000 but publishes no precise year-end headcount series and no attrition rate on any cadence, so this table shows the disclosed threshold rather than a trend line. The reductions that are disclosed have fallen disproportionately on corporate and non-customer-facing positions, roughly 7,900 across 2023 and 2024, while frontline retail and pharmacy coverage remained strategically protected. That asymmetry matters for anyone weighing a corporate offer against a store or clinical one.