How Deel Pays

Professional ladder — D1 through D7

Leadership ladder — D8 through D11

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Deel's published job-level guidance describes an individual contributor path of junior, specialist, senior and lead, staff or principal, and a management path of manager, senior manager, director, senior director, vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president and C-suite. That guidance is Deel-authored advice for its customers and does not name Deel's own internal codes.
• The same guidance states that global compensation bands typically vary by geography, which is the only company statement in the file that supports a location-adjusted model at all.
• Official Deel postings quote one US dollar reference range across every permitted hiring location and skill profile. The range therefore spans several of the bands used here and cannot be read as a city band.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for engineering, product and operations titles that appear in both postings and salary records, and least reliable for sales, where base and on-target earnings are mixed together in public data.
• Deel has acquired several businesses, including the compensation-management startup Assemble in December 2024. No public source maps inherited grades, retention grants or title conversions onto a harmonized ladder.
• The C-suite tier is deliberately absent from the pay ladder. Carrying a worldwide executive row would have forced every location's factor toward one at the top and produced impossible offshore cells.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus San Francisco

Deel does not publish an office directory with headcount, and its remote-first model means a market can carry employees without an office at all. This catalogue therefore ranks nothing by size; it lists the markets where a defensible calibration could be built.

San Francisco anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• San Francisco is the anchor because it is the headquarters reference address on Deel's US visa filings. Its medians are the normalized global reference multiplied by 1.05, and every other market is expressed relative to San Francisco here.
• The strongest single offshore observation is an India Software Engineer II package of about ₹58.1 lakh base with ₹11.2 lakh of stock, and a Bengaluru version of the same title at about ₹62.4 lakh base with ₹20.5 lakh of stock. Both sit above the flat 0.48 base calibration for that level.
• New York carries 33 historical H-1B worksite records against 14 for San Francisco, so the largest disclosed US concentration is not the headquarters city. Worksite records are filings, not employees.
• Miami, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and Auckland have no usable Deel-specific city sample at all. Their columns are pure model and should be read as a planning envelope.
• Deel processes about $22 billion of payroll a year for its customers and their 1.5 million-plus workers. None of that population is in these tables, which describe pay for Deel's own employees only.

• No BSE, NSE, SEBI or ASX employee-share allotment log exists for Deel, and there is no SEC grant-by-executive log or employee option-exercise register. The only SEC document in the file is a Form D exempt-offering notice from 2 June 2020 and its later amendments, which is a financing filing rather than an equity-plan disclosure.
• Because the pool size and utilisation are private, an employee cannot compute their ownership percentage, their dilution from later rounds or the effect of the preference stack on common shares.
• A private-market indication is not a strike price and not a 409A fair market value. The two can diverge widely, and the 409A price is what determines the tax position on an option exercise.
• There is no evidence in any reviewed source that the December 2024 acquisition of the compensation-management startup Assemble created a new or amended Deel equity plan.

Private-market reference points, not plan disclosures

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

This is the schedule employees report, not a schedule Deel publishes. It says nothing about what happens on leaving: the post-termination exercise window, any early-exercise right, repurchase rights and transfer restrictions are the terms that decide whether vested equity is worth anything, and none of them are public.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• There is no published eligibility threshold. Employee records show selective grants from roughly the professional level upward, becoming common in scarce-skill engineering and leadership roles, but no rule is disclosed.
• The annualized values shown per band are a modelled value equivalent. They must not be converted into a share count, because the share class, strike price, conversion terms, dilution and liquidity discount are unknown.
• An offshore grant is discounted far less than offshore base pay in this model, which is why the total-compensation gap narrows at senior levels while the base gap does not.
• A Bengaluru Software Engineer II record shows about ₹20.5 lakh of stock, roughly $21,500, which is larger than the entire modelled global equity envelope for that level. Individual grants clearly vary far more than any band range implies.

Indicative annual grant value by band — San Francisco

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

The official leadership page lists Alex Bouaziz as co-founder and chief executive, Shuo Wang as co-founder and chief revenue officer, Joe Kauffman as president and chief financial officer, Dan Westgarth as chief operating officer, Philippe Bouaziz as executive chairman and chief strategy officer, Yaron Lavi as chief technology officer, Harish Sharma as chief risk officer, Anthony Rodriguez as chief compliance officer and DeAnn Work as global corporate general counsel. Cash, bonus, equity and total are not publicly disclosed for any of them.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one structural feature worth planning around is that a private company's equity refresh has no public grant calendar and no observable price. At a listed employer an annual refresh lands on a known date at a known share price; at Deel neither is visible, so the cash component of a promotion is the only part a candidate can verify at the time it happens.

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 two source bundles for Deel are byte-identical, so there was no disagreement between filings to reconcile and no discrepancy to record. The whole file rests on a single research pass dated 26 August 2026.
2. 2The C-suite band, D12 in the research architecture, is excluded from the pay ladder entirely because every one of its cells is undisclosed. Carrying a single worldwide executive row would also have dragged every location factor toward one at the top of the ladder and produced impossible offshore cells, so the executive layer is described qualitatively instead.
3. 3Base calibration is flat across the ladder in every market because the underlying model applies one multiplier per city at every level. Total compensation is not flat, and the divergence is deliberate rather than an artefact: the model discounts offshore equity far less than offshore base, which is why Bengaluru rises from 0.48 to 0.59 of the anchor and Buenos Aires from 0.38 to 0.51 between D1 and D11.
4. 4No employer benefit load is included in any total. Social insurance, superannuation, provident fund and insurance costs are employer cost rather than pay, so every total reconciles to base plus target variable pay plus annualized equity and nothing else.
5. 5Sales roles are deliberately outside the location factor model. Commission plans move with quota and attainment rather than geography, and folding them into one interpolated factor would misstate whole markets, so the sales evidence is carried in the variable pay section instead.
6. 6Sixteen markets are modelled against a company that hires in more than 100 countries. Four of the sixteen, Miami, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and Auckland, have no usable Deel-specific city observation at all.
7. 7H1BGrader and MyVisaJobs disagree on filing counts because they group Deel, Deel Inc. and Deel US LLC differently and refresh on different schedules. Both are shown rather than averaged into a single false number.
8. 8The FY2026 visa quartiles rest on seven search-visible records. They are a sample, not the distribution of the filing population.
9. 9Deel's founding year, fiscal year end and audited financials are not established by any source in the bundle, so they are omitted from the header rather than filled from memory.

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 — 50 sources

There is no year-by-year headcount series for Deel, because a private company publishes none. One current figure exists and it comes from job-advertisement boilerplate rather than an audited disclosure, so it should be treated as approximate and as a point in time. No split by country, city or function is available, and attrition is not disclosed at any level.