How D.R. Horton Pays

Research ladder — R0 through R8 employee bands

Executive — proxy disclosure, not city-adjusted

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• No companywide band labels, grade numbers, salary structures or technical level map was found in any filing, careers page or compensation platform reviewed. R0 through R10 exists only to organise the evidence and should never be quoted back to the company as its own architecture.
• D.R. Horton discloses a title-rich operating hierarchy instead of grades: market leadership, division leadership, region leadership and executive officers. That hierarchy is real and useful, but it maps to scope rather than to a pay band.
• Four distinct tracks share the ladder. Field operations runs intern to assistant superintendent to superintendent to construction manager to director of construction to division president. Land and development runs land coordinator to project manager to acquisition or development manager to director. Corporate and technical runs clerk to analyst or software engineer to senior individual contributor to manager to director to vice president. Sales runs trainee to new-home sales consultant to community sales manager to area sales manager.
• There is no software-company-style engineering ladder. Public technical submissions for D.R. Horton are sparse, so corporate and technical individual contributor levels are mapped to generic title seniority rather than to a claimed internal system.
• No predecessor-grade structure or post-merger grade harmonisation programme was found. Forestar and the financial services subsidiaries may use function-specific titles, but no public evidence supports a separate inherited band framework.
• The non-employee board is a governance package on a separate fee and restricted stock unit schedule, not an employment band, and is excluded from the ladder entirely.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Arlington

The eight requested non-United States locations in the source brief, Bengaluru, Sydney, Toronto, London, Auckland, Frankfurt, Singapore and Dubai, were each checked and each returned no verified D.R. Horton employee operation. They are deliberately absent from this table rather than populated with estimated local pay or statutory benefits that would not belong to this employer.

Arlington anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Arlington, Texas is the anchor. It is both the disclosed corporate headquarters at 1341 Horton Circle and a core Dallas-Fort Worth operating market, so the national research medians and the anchor column are the same numbers at a 1.00 factor.
• The strongest city-specific evidence is a Chicago superintendent posting at $75,000 to $95,000, Colorado postings for assistant superintendent at $55,000 to $75,000 and project manager at $60,000 to $100,000, and California pay-transparency postings behind the San Ramon column.
• The spread between the cheapest and most expensive market in this report is only 1.24 times, from Orlando at 0.97 to San Ramon at 1.20. That is a far narrower geographic band than a multinational employer shows, because every market is a domestic homebuilding labour market.
• D.R. Horton does not publish employee counts by city, so no market in this table can be ranked by headcount and none is claimed to be the largest.
• The R9 and R10 rows are companywide SEC disclosures for named jobs. They are repeated identically in every city table in the source bundle and should be read as national figures regardless of which market is selected.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 1.9 million share difference between the 22.1 million reserved and the 20.2 million available is an implied committed amount, about 8.6 percent of the reservation. It is not a utilisation ledger, because cancellations, forfeitures, legacy-plan recycling and performance settlement at up to 300 percent all move the number.
• No stock options were outstanding at 30 September 2025 and none were granted in recent years, so the plan's option and stock appreciation right authority is dormant. There were correspondingly no option exercises to report in FY2025.
• Performance share units are the volatile element. The October 2025 grant of 374,025 target units can settle anywhere from zero to 1,122,075 shares depending on relative total shareholder return, return on assets, earnings-per-share growth and pre-tax return on assets over the period ending 30 September 2028.
• The October 2022 cohort settled 484,492 shares in October 2025 after the September 2025 performance certification, which is the only completed performance cycle visible in the current filings.
• Non-employee directors receive an annual 1,445-unit restricted stock unit award worth approximately $235,000 at grant, vesting in five equal annual instalments. That is a governance award from the same plan, not an employee grant.

2024 Stock Incentive Plan and ESPP at 30 September 2025

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule above is the five-year equal-instalment pattern used for current chief executive, chief operating officer and chief financial officer restricted stock units. A three-year equal-instalment variant also exists and is what the executive chairman's 39,720 units use, and the plan floor is a one-year minimum. Performance share units do not follow this schedule at all: they cliff at the end of a three-year performance period and settle at 0 to 300 percent of target once the committee certifies the result.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• R0 through R3: potentially eligible for the employee stock purchase plan subject to plan rules. No evidence of routine restricted stock unit or performance share unit grants exists at these levels, and no grant size or frequency is disclosed.
• R4 through R6: potentially eligible for the purchase plan and inside the population from which key-employee awards can be selected, but no published threshold, entitlement or typical grant value.
• R7 through R8: leadership participation in the key-employee award pool is plausible and consistent with the aggregate recipient count, but it is not guaranteed by title and no value is disclosed.
• R9 and R10: an annual disclosed programme of performance share units and restricted stock units, plus the stock half of the pre-tax-income bonus delivered as fully vested shares.
• Approximately 1,600 restricted stock unit recipients in the first nine months of FY2026 is about 11.2 percent of FY2025 headcount. That denominator is directional only, because the recipient count spans nine months and the headcount is a point-in-time figure.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Arlington

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $151.29 reference price at 26 August 2026 reference quote and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The executive chairman's equity is structured differently from the rest of the team: 39,719 target performance share units against 39,720 restricted stock units, an almost even split vesting over three years, where the chief executive, chief operating officer and chief financial officer are heavily performance-weighted on five-year restricted units. FY2025 value realised on vesting was $35.14 million for Auld on 236,752 shares, $16.26 million for Romanowski on 112,028 shares, $15.87 million for Murray on 109,247 shares and $11.36 million for Wheat on 78,628 shares. No stock option exercises were reported, consistent with no options outstanding.

Board compensation framework

Non-employee directors are paid a meeting-fee schedule rather than the flat annual retainer most large issuers now use, which is unusual and means attendance drives cash pay directly. The executive chairman is an employee and is paid under the executive programme, not this schedule, so he does not appear in the director table.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

What is measurable is the outcome. In FY2025 eighteen employees moved into new homebuilding market-leadership positions and 100 percent of those placements were internal promotions. Average tenure runs 28 years on the executive team, 20 years among region presidents and vice presidents and 15 years among division presidents and city managers. Read together, that describes a slow, experience-heavy ladder with a genuinely strong internal pipeline, and it implies that external candidates compete for a narrow set of entry points rather than for leadership roles.

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1Only one research bundle exists for D.R. Horton, so there is no second source to reconcile against. Where the bundle's long-form report and its structured data file both carry a figure, they agree; the figures used here are the filing-traceable ones in every case.
2. 2The R9 and R10 rows are kept in the band table because the two-row executive layer is genuinely part of the ladder, but they are companywide SEC totals for named jobs and are repeated identically in every city table in the source. They are excluded from the range chart, and the location factor should be ignored when reading them.
3. 3R9 and R10 are shown as the midpoint of two disclosed packages each: R9 averages the chief operating officer at $21.05 million and the chief financial officer at $16.07 million, and R10 averages the chief executive at $25.13 million and the executive chairman at $17.94 million. Neither is a range anyone is offered, and both are one fiscal year rather than a recurring level.
4. 4Equity is recorded as a real zero for R0 through R8. Selected key-employee awards plainly reach some of those employees, since about 1,600 people received restricted stock units, but no band-level grant value is disclosed anywhere so no figure could be entered without inventing one. Real total compensation at R5 through R8 is therefore understated by an unknown amount.
5. 5No notional employer benefit load is added to any total. Total compensation is base plus modeled bonus only, so it is pay rather than employer cost, and the $44.3 million 401(k) match expense is reported as a company metric rather than folded into any band.
6. 6City factors are analytical normalisations from the research bundle, not company policy. Only Chicago, Denver and San Ramon carry a direct city-specific salary observation; the remaining eleven markets are modeled and Seattle in particular has no posting anchor at all.
7. 7The R7 and R8 rows are the weakest in the table. D.R. Horton discloses the titles and average tenures for division and region leadership but no compensation, and public salary submissions for those titles are sparse and inconsistent.
8. 8No geographic revenue split is disclosed, so no regional revenue panel is presented. The company reports segment revenue and segment headcount, but that is a business-line split rather than a geographic one and is not substituted for a regional breakdown.
9. 9The FY2025 revenue figure of $34.3 billion comes from the bundle's structured data rather than from a quoted line in its long-form report, which quotes the FY2026 third-quarter figures of $9.2 billion of revenue and $904.9 million of net income and nine-month revenue of $23.7 billion.
10. 10The H-1B section is omitted entirely rather than shown empty. No recent labour condition application activity was found, so there is no wage distribution, city percentile or approval rate to present.
11. 11The founding year is not stated in any reviewed source, so it is deliberately absent from the company summary line rather than filled in from general knowledge.

Source register — 17 sources

The workforce grew hard into FY2024 and then contracted in FY2025 without any announced reduction programme, salary freeze or pay cut. Short-term incentive plan expense fell in parallel, from $35.4 million in FY2023 to $22.5 million in FY2025, so the compensation envelope tightened alongside the headcount. D.R. Horton does not publish quarterly employee counts or city-level headcount, and does not disclose attrition in any year, so the FY2025 year-end figure is the most precise count available.