How Dollar General Pays

Frontline ladder — DG-1 through DG-3

Professional and field-management ladder — DG-4 through DG-7

Senior leadership ladder — DG-8 through DG-10

Executive

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• No official enterprise-wide grade nomenclature was found in any Dollar General filing, careers page or posting. DG-1 to DG-11 is a research taxonomy and should never be quoted to the company as its own structure.
• Dollar General reported that more than 70 percent of store managers and a majority of senior leadership positions were filled internally, so the promotion ladder is real even though no time-in-grade data is published.
• The retail ladder is the clearest: sales associate, lead sales associate, assistant store manager, store manager, district manager, then regional field leadership. Distribution runs warehouse and fleet roles into supervisors and distribution centre directors.
• Corporate technology runs senior software engineer, lead software engineer, then principal engineer or solution architect. Lead software engineer is the most heavily evidenced title in the entire company because of the H-1B record.
• The DG-11 row carries proxy figures for a handful of named officers. It is a national disclosure, not a market band, and neither the range chart nor the city factors should be applied to it.
• There is no legacy-merger grade harmonisation to unpick. The only structural inheritance is the amended and restated 2007 Stock Incentive Plan, superseded for new grants by the 2021 plan.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Goodlettsville

Mexico is the only non-US retail market, with 17 stores and 147 compensated employees. China, Hong Kong and Turkey together account for 106 people in sourcing and other operations. None of these has a published pay band, benefit schedule or wage rate, so none appears in the location table. Requested comparisons to Bangalore, Sydney, London, Toronto, Singapore, Dubai and Auckland describe no verified Dollar General workforce and were left out rather than modelled.

Goodlettsville anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Goodlettsville, Tennessee is the anchor at 1.00. It holds the principal executive offices at 100 Mission Ridge, the corporate functions and the technology organisation, and it supplies ten of the visible H-1B wage observations.
• The highest factors are Dallas–Fort Worth at 1.10, Amsterdam, New York at 1.08 and Atlanta at 1.07. In New York the driver is the state wage floor for hourly staff; in Dallas and Atlanta it is a deep metropolitan market for corporate and technology roles.
• The lowest factors are Jonesville, South Carolina and Bessemer, Alabama at 0.90, both federal-minimum-wage states, followed by Blair, Nebraska at 0.92 and Alachua, Florida at 0.94.
• Indianapolis and Westfield sit at parity with Goodlettsville at 1.00, which is consistent with the single visible Westfield lead software engineer record at $140,920 against a Goodlettsville median of $122,000.
• The store and corporate populations move in the same direction across these markets, which is why one factor is applied to the whole ladder. Where a distribution centre carries no corporate roles at all, the upper bands are notional for that city.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• A clean utilisation rate cannot be derived here. The SEC equity-plan table combines outstanding awards, legacy 2007 plan effects and shares still available under plan rules, so dividing 4,653,023 by the original 11,838,143-share authorisation would produce a misleading percentage.
• Options are effectively a legacy instrument. FY2025 granted 4,421 options against 1,264,784 RSUs and 454,393 PSUs, and the 2,570,957 options still outstanding carry a $163.64 weighted-average exercise price against a $123.41 share snapshot.
• The $163.64 weighted-average exercise price applies only to option-like securities in the table. It is not an RSU or PSU grant price and it says nothing about the value of a stock award.
• FY2025 share-based compensation expense of $91.453 million was up 55.7 percent on FY2024, which is consistent with the sharp increase in RSU and PSU grant volume rather than with a broader eligible population.
• At $123.41 a share, a $1 million nominal award is roughly 8,103 shares, a $5 million award roughly 40,515 shares and a $12 million award roughly 97,237 shares. These are translation aids, not grant counts.

2021 Stock Incentive Plan and award activity at 30 January 2026

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

Annual named-executive RSU awards for FY2025 vest one third on each 1 April following the grant fiscal year. Performance share units are measured over one to three years and generally vest over three, with FY2025 awards weighted 50 percent on an EBITDA component and 50 percent on return on invested capital, except for Donny Lau's differently designed award. Non-employee director RSUs vest in one year. Inducement awards follow their own contracts: Lau's vest 50 percent on the second anniversary and 50 percent on the third, while Fleeman's vest ratably over three years from his CEO start date.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• DG-1 to DG-4: no public evidence of any standard recurring equity grant. Store and distribution employees should not assume participation, and the 2021 plan is not a broad-based ownership scheme.
• DG-5 to DG-7: selective new-hire, promotion or retention awards are possible under the plan's award forms, but the minimum eligible level is not disclosed and no grant size is published.
• DG-8 to DG-9: selective eligibility is plausible and supported by award forms addressed to certain employees, though there is no public grant-size matrix.
• DG-10: likely eligible as a designated key employee, probably annually for selected vice presidents. This is an inference from plan eligibility language and the executive pipeline, not a published policy.
• DG-11: verified recurring annual equity. FY2025 target values ran $4.5 million to $5.0 million and grant-date accounting values ran roughly $5.06 million to $6.11 million for the reported officers, typically split half RSUs and half PSUs.
• Chief executive: contract-specific. Todd Vasos received no FY2025 annual grant at all and a nominal $12 million FY2026 award; Jerry Fleeman receives $4 million of inducement RSUs plus a $7.5 million annual target.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Goodlettsville

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $123.41 reference price at Latest close shown on Dollar General Investor Relations at the 27 August 2026 research cut-off and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Donny Lau's $7,566,340 is not annualised: he became chief financial officer on 20 October 2025, so his $230,777 of salary covers about a quarter of the year, and his package carries a $900,000 signing bonus plus inducement and new-hire equity. Steven Deckard's total is inflated by a $2 million separation-related payment after his position was eliminated in November 2025, and his $2,030,269 of other compensation is almost entirely that. Kelly Dilts and Steven Deckard both show nil non-equity incentive because they were not employed at the FY2025 Teamshare payment date. FY2025 salary increases were decided in March 2025 and took effect on 1 April 2025 against a 3.0 percent overall United States merit budget: Dilts received 7.84 percent, Emily Taylor 3.16 percent, Rhonda Taylor 3.73 percent, Wenkoff 9.16 percent and Deckard 10.71 percent.

Board compensation framework

A non-chair director with no committee chair role received about $285,000 in FY2025, two thirds of it in restricted stock units that vest in a year. Every retainer rose for FY2026, and the independent chair's additional $200,000 equity retainer means the chair's package is roughly double a standard director's. Individual director totals vary with committee chair roles and partial-year service.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one hard progression fact Dollar General publishes is that more than 70 percent of store managers and a majority of senior leadership positions were filled internally as of the FY2025 Form 10-K. That is a strong internal-mobility signal and it is the main argument for staying rather than moving laterally, but the company publishes no average time in grade to sit alongside it. Employee discussion boards describe anniversary-based reviews in some store roles and small hourly increases of around a quarter of a dollar, but those accounts conflict with each other and are not treated as policy here.

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 chief executive row is deliberately absent from the band table. A single worldwide contract figure of $8.16 million would distort every city cell if it were multiplied by a location factor, so DG-12 is carried in the executive section only.
2. 2DG-11 is kept in the band table for ladder completeness but is marked as excluded from the range chart. It is a national proxy disclosure of seven people, and the city factors should not be read against it.
3. 3No employer benefit load is included anywhere in this report. Total compensation is rebuilt from base plus bonus plus equity so that it reconciles, and the 401(k) match, payroll taxes and insurance cost are treated as employer cost rather than pay.
4. 4The equity figures at DG-8, DG-9 and DG-10 are the residual between the bundle's own modelled base and total midpoints after bonus is set at the midpoint of the modelled target range. They stand in for selective awards whose size Dollar General does not disclose, and they are not observed grant values.
5. 5Store and corporate populations move in the same direction across the twelve markets, so one factor is applied to the whole ladder. Where a distribution centre carries no corporate roles, the upper bands are notional for that city and should be read as the market rate rather than as a Dollar General population.
6. 6The bundle carried INR translations for every figure at a 95.39 rupee rate. Those were dropped because Dollar General has no verified Indian workforce and the translations implied a comparison that does not exist.
7. 7No non-US location is priced. Mexico, China, Hong Kong and Turkey together employ 253 people with no disclosed pay data, and modelling them from national statistics would describe those countries rather than this company.
8. 8Prior-year headcount is not reproduced in the source bundle, so the headcount panel carries the FY2025 figure with the multi-year 401(k) match and share-based compensation series as the only workforce-scale trend available.
9. 9Bonus percentages between DG-4 and DG-10 are derived from the bundle's modelled ranges rather than from any Dollar General target table, and the variable percent shown on each row is the implied ratio of the modelled bonus to the modelled base.

Source register — 14 sources

Dollar General publishes no attrition rate, no quarterly voluntary turnover series and no store-manager turnover figure, and a review-site number would not be comparable with a company-reported one. The 401(k) match expense series is the closest public proxy for aggregate workforce cost movement, and it rose 12.0 percent across the two years while share-based compensation rose 76.2 percent, which is a clean picture of where reward growth has been concentrated.