How Deere & Company Pays

Early career — pre-grade entry

Analytical navigation tier — below the reported grade series

Reported technology grade series — Grade 6 through Grade 12

Executive — analytical navigation tiers and disclosed officers

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Grades 6 to 12 are technology-role mappings drawn from public salary submissions. They must not be applied mechanically to manufacturing, finance, sales or field-service jobs; no cross-functional Deere grade book was located in any source.
• G5, EX1 and EX2 are starred because they normalise scope rather than reproduce an official Deere code. They exist so that the entry-professional and officer populations are navigable, and they carry no filing authority.
• Deere's India careers material explicitly distinguishes a knowledge path from a people-leadership path, which supports the dual-track reading of Grade 9 upward without supplying any numeric mapping between the two.
• The Grade 6 anchor is an average across two labour markets that Deere prices very differently. A live East Moline software posting runs $86,892 to $130,332 while a live Davenport motor-grader engineering posting runs $67,692 to $101,532, a 43 percent gap at the top of the range for the same nominal seniority.
• Deere's US production workforce is represented by organised labour and paid on negotiated wage scales. No union agreement, wage schedule or hourly rate appears anywhere in this bundle, so no negotiated scale has been folded into any band anchor here and none should be inferred from them.
• Every band anchor describes the salaried professional population only. Hourly manufacturing, dealer-network and field-service pay are outside the evidence base entirely.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Moline

Deere's public locations directory verifies the nine US sites listed here, and its global entity and privacy records verify the German, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Chinese, Dutch, British, Argentine and Singaporean sites. India's contact directory verifies Pune, Dewas and Indore. Five entries are carried as coverage markers rather than verified Deere offices: Bangalore, Saltillo, Torreón, Auckland and Dubai. Deere gives no floor area, no site headcount and no office-versus-plant split for any location, so a manufacturing site and a corporate office appear identically in the table.

Moline anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Moline is the anchor because it is the global headquarters, the largest single H-1B worksite at 24 of the 64 FY2026 filings, and the reference point every US calibration factor in this report is measured against.
• The anchor medians themselves are US-wide reported averages rather than Moline-specific observations. Deere's Quad Cities sites cluster tightly between 0.94 and 1.02 of the anchor, so the substitution is small, but Cary at 1.08 and Chicago at 1.15 sit meaningfully above it.
• The H-1B extract gives an independent check on the US spread: Cary's median filing runs $140,000 and Austin's $145,000 against $129,500 at Moline, while Waterloo's two filings sit at $96,371. That is a wider US range than the 0.91 to 1.15 factor band implies, driven by role mix rather than geography.
• Pune is the only non-US location with direct Deere pay observations at more than one grade. Every other international factor rests on market cost, on small-sample employee-reported ranges, or on a legal-entity record confirming that the site exists.
• Bangalore is carried as an India technology-market proxy and is explicitly not a confirmed Deere office. Auckland, Dubai, Saltillo and Torreón are coverage markers with the same caveat.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The gap between eligibility and practice is the single most important equity fact at Deere. About 38,000 salaried employees were legally eligible at the 2020 disclosure; in FY2019 Deere granted restricted shares to 916 of them, options to 111 and performance share units to 23.
• The December 2019 cycle was narrower still: 277,237 restricted shares to 921 employees, 494,647 options to 110 employees and 66,974 performance share units to 22 employees. Two consecutive cycles at roughly the same participation makes this a policy pattern rather than a one-year anomaly.
• Full-value awards consume 2.5 shares of the reserve each against one share for an option, so the plan's economics push toward options at scale and toward restricted and performance units only where retention matters most.
• The current ungranted reserve balance and the plan utilisation rate were not extracted from a current plan-share table and are not disclosed here. Nothing in this report should be read as a statement about how much of the 18 million shares remains.
• Deere India is not separately listed on any Indian exchange, so there is no BSE or NSE employee stock option allotment disclosure to read. Parent-company SEC filings are the only public channel for Deere equity anywhere in the world.

Equity plan and award concentration

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The three-year ratable schedule describes the restricted stock unit component of the annual executive long-term incentive programme, which the current programme reports as vesting annually over three years. Performance share unit and option terms are award-specific and are not published as a standard schedule. The March 2026 retention awards behave differently again: nothing vests along the way, five annual results are averaged, and settlement happens once at the end of a five-year period running to 27 October 2030. For ordinary employees there is no published vesting schedule of any kind, because there is no published grant schedule either.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• A0: no routine evidence of intern equity and none expected.
• G5 through G8: legally eligible and wholly discretionary. Reported annual stock averages are small and erratic at about $3,542 at Grade 6, $1,375 at Grade 7 and $2,778 at Grade 8, which describes occasional awards rather than a schedule.
• G9: one reported technical sample showed zero annual stock while manager samples varied. A zero in one sample does not establish ineligibility.
• G10 and G11: reported annual stock rises materially to about $19,200 and $36,056. This is where equity starts to be a real part of the package, still without any published grade threshold.
• G12: the grade is visible in salary submissions but no public grant quantum exists. Awards are likely annual or retention-driven for selected leaders, which is an inference rather than a disclosure.
• EX1 and EX2: annual long-term incentive plus possible one-time grants, subject to committee approval, performance conditions, service and share-ownership policies. Named-executive awards are disclosed individually; nobody else's are.
• Chief executive: $18.205 million of FY2025 stock and option value, plus a separate $25 million target five-year retention performance share award.
• Nonemployee directors: a $180,000 deferred restricted stock unit retainer each year, vesting after one year and generally held until board retirement.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Moline

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $635.99 reference price at 26 August 2026 snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The four non-chief-executive named executives sit within $300,000 of each other on FY2025 totals, which is a narrower spread than their portfolios would suggest: worldwide construction and forestry, financial services and technology, production and precision agriculture, and the chief financial officer role. That compression is consistent with a common target structure driven by the same corporate performance factors rather than by business-unit results. The March 2026 retention awards break the symmetry deliberately, giving $5 million targets to Campbell and Kovar and nothing disclosed for Kalathur, which reads as a succession-facing retention decision. Joshua A. Jepsen appears as former chief financial officer, with T. Brent Norwood appointed from 1 May 2026 on a $925,000 salary, a 100 percent short-term incentive target and 8,809 performance share units. Only the four non-chief-executive totals were available in the bundle, so their salary, cash incentive and stock components are shown as zero rather than estimated, and Norwood’s row carries only his verified base because neither his target incentive nor his unit grant has a disclosed dollar value.

Board compensation framework

A nonemployee director's baseline package is $320,000 a year, $140,000 in cash and $180,000 in deferred stock, rising to $360,000 for the lead director and $345,000 for the audit or compensation chair. The equity majority matters: the deferred restricted stock units are generally held until the director retires from the board, which turns the retainer into a long-dated shareholding rather than annual income. Employee directors receive no separate board compensation.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The executive process is fully described: the committee sets short-term and long-term incentive targets and metrics at the start of the fiscal year, tracks operating return on operating assets, operating return on sales, return on equity, relative revenue growth, relative total shareholder return and shareholder value added as applicable, certifies results and individual outcomes at year end, and then awards vest under award-specific terms. Nothing equivalent is published for employees. The one process fact that reaches the salaried population is negative: a reported FY2026 merit freeze covering executives as well as salaried staff, which means the usual assumption of an annual increment should not be applied to that year without local verification.

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 Deere, so there are no cross-bundle disagreements to reconcile. Where the bundle's own analytical model and its reported observations disagree, the reported observation has been preferred and the model layer is labelled as modeled.
2. 2Location factors are held FLAT across the ladder and no baseFactorTop or totalFactorTop has been set. The bundle's seniority convergence formula, city index plus one minus city index times a convergence weight, converges the entire executive tier and the chief executive row toward global parity by construction rather than by evidence, so interpolating to it would price a Bangalore executive vice president at 89 percent of Moline. The genuine level-dependent compression the reported data does show, India totals at about 17 percent of Moline at Grade 6 rising to about 36 percent at Grade 9, is stated in the copy and in globalOps.modelRules instead of being encoded in the factors.
3. 3The chief executive, EX1 and EX2 rows are kept in the bands table for ladder completeness but are marked chartExcluded, and because the factors are flat they carry no geographic interpolation at all. The nonemployee director tier has been left out of bands entirely and is carried in the executive board compensation table, since it is a governance retainer rather than a rung on any ladder.
4. 4Base and total calibration factors are identical in every market because the source model derives both from a single city index. No independent total-compensation calibration exists in the bundle, and none has been fabricated to create the appearance of one.
5. 5No employer benefit load has been added to any total. Provident fund, superannuation, 401(k), pension and insurance are employer cost rather than pay, and every usTotal here reconciles to the sum of its base, bonus, equity and other components.
6. 6Grade 12 has a visible grade label in salary submissions but no pay observation at all. Its anchor is extrapolated from the Grade 10 to Grade 11 slope and is labelled modeled.
7. 7For the four named executives other than the chief executive, only FY2025 totals were available in the bundle; their salary, cash incentive and stock components are shown as zero rather than estimated. T. Brent Norwood's row carries only the verified $925,000 base, since his 100 percent incentive target and 8,809 performance share units have no disclosed dollar value.
8. 8Deere's represented United States production workforce is excluded entirely. No collective agreement, wage schedule or hourly rate appears anywhere in this bundle, so no negotiated scale has been folded into any band anchor, any location factor or any headline figure, and this report describes the salaried professional population only.
9. 9The Argentine peso conversion uses a 31 July 2026 representative rate rather than the 25 August 2026 snapshot applied to every other currency, because of exchange rate volatility. The Rosario cells are correspondingly less reliable than the rest of the table.
10. 10Five of the 35 locations are coverage markers rather than verified Deere offices: Bangalore, Saltillo, Torreón, Auckland and Dubai. Their factors describe local markets, not confirmed Deere pay positions.
11. 11The FY2026 H-1B capture may be partial, so the 64-filing count is a floor rather than a final total.

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 — 26 sources

Deere publishes a single global employee number and one India figure, and nothing else. There is no city headcount, no segment headcount, no salaried versus hourly split and no attrition rate in any year. That means the 35-market footprint in this report is a location catalogue with market factors attached, not a distribution of where Deere's people actually are, and readers should not infer relative site size from the length of the table.