How Eli Lilly Pays

Operations ladder — G0

Professional IC ladder — P1 through P4

Expert IC ladder — P5 and P6

Management ladder — M1 through M3

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Lilly job postings and visa filings expose internal range codes such as R1 to R4, R2 to R4 and P1 to P3, but no public document maps those codes to titles or to a global grade. Any alignment between a posted range code and a band here is inference.
• P6 is labelled Associate Director-equivalent purely as a market crosswalk. Public evidence does not establish a consistent one-to-one equivalence between the expert and management tracks, and the two do not necessarily share a grade in Lilly's own system.
• No public company-wide map of legacy or acquisition-inherited grades was located. Title differences between an acquired site and the Indianapolis campus should be assumed possible until verified in an offer letter or the internal HR system.
• M1 base pay sits below P6 base pay in the aggregator sample. That inversion is preserved rather than smoothed, and it means a move from Senior Advisor to Associate Director should be argued on bonus target and equity eligibility rather than on base.
• The E1 and E2 executive rows are global proxy anchors that carry no city factor. They are deliberately excluded from the band table so that a single worldwide chief executive figure cannot drag every offshore market's factor toward parity at the top of the ladder.
• Dwell times shown as promotion intervals are a market career model, not a Lilly promotion policy. Lilly publishes no rating scale, no promotion hike matrix and no universal review effective date.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Indianapolis

The footprint covers the named sites in the research bundle: nine United States locations, three in India, three in Ireland, three in the United Kingdom, two each in Germany, France, China and Puerto Rico, and single markets in Australia, Spain, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Canada. It is not a complete list of Lilly facilities, and no city-level headcount is published for any of them.

Indianapolis anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Indianapolis is the anchor at 1.00 for both base and total. It is the global headquarters, the home of Lilly Research Laboratories and the worksite behind 313 of the FY2025 H-1B records, which makes it the best-evidenced market in the footprint.
• United States premiums are flat across the ladder: New York at 1.25, Boston and Cambridge at 1.22, San Diego at 1.20, Branchburg at 1.12, Philadelphia at 1.10 and Research Triangle Park at 1.06, with Concord at 0.98 and Lebanon at 0.97 below the anchor. None of these markets carries a separate top-of-ladder factor because the bundle shows none.
• Non-US markets compress steeply at the junior end and much less at the senior end, so each carries a separate factor at G0 and at M3 with every band in between interpolated by seniority. Shanghai moves from 0.32 to 0.90 times base and Bangalore from 0.11 to 0.35.
• Toronto is the one market whose factor falls as the ladder rises, from 0.71 at G0 to 0.66 at M3, because the Canadian Associate Director samples sit unusually close to the professional bands. The inversion is preserved rather than flattened.
• Puerto Rico is priced in US dollars but calibrated separately from the mainland, at 0.71 for Carolina and 0.68 for Guayama at entry level, so it is treated as its own benefit region rather than folded into the United States.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 42.4 million shares available at 31 December 2025 cannot be turned into a clean utilisation ratio against the 53 million post-2018 sublimit, because forfeitures, cancellations and shares returning from prior plans can replenish availability. The bundle deliberately refuses to publish a depletion percentage and this report follows it.
• 2025 stock compensation expense was $626 million against $65.179 billion of revenue, just under one percent, which is an order of magnitude below a large-cap technology issuer and is the single clearest signal that Lilly equity is a management instrument rather than a broad pay component.
• $554 million of unrecognized cost remained at 31 December 2025, most of it attached to 2.3 million nonvested restricted stock units. On a $1,175.10 share price that block is worth roughly $2.7 billion at settlement, which is what a three-year cliff schedule does to the shape of the liability.
• The plan caps any one participant at 1,500,000 shares in a calendar year, a limit no disclosed grant comes close to: the chief executive's $23.325 million target is under 25,000 shares at the reference price.

2002 Lilly Stock Plan at 31 December 2025

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

This is the correction that matters most for anyone arriving from a technology employer. A four-year annual vesting template would misstate the disclosed design: Lilly uses a three-year cycle, and the performance vehicles resolve at the end of that cycle rather than in tranches along the way. The February 2026 Form 4 filings show what settlement looks like in practice, with Daniel Skovronsky vesting 12,684 shares and 5,641.249 of them withheld for taxes on the same day.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The 10-K says restricted stock units go to certain employees and that performance awards go to officers and management. The United States benefits page separately says stock programs offer all employees an opportunity to own Lilly stock. Those two statements are not in conflict and they are not the same thing: an ownership opportunity is not an annual grant.
• No Lilly employee stock purchase plan appears in the 10-K, the proxy or the plan document, so no discounted purchase mechanism is modelled anywhere in this report.
• Below the named-executive level Lilly publishes no grant threshold, no eligibility rule and no standard grant size. Every band equity figure in this report is a residual reconciling base and bonus to an observed total, not a reported award.
• Equity becomes materially likely from P5 upward and materially large from M2 upward. Below P2 the bundle finds no recurring grant evidence at all, and a zero in those rows is a real zero rather than a missing value.
• Executive officers face a one-year post-vest holding requirement on net shares and unvested awards do not count toward the ownership guideline, which pushes real liquidity out to four years from grant even on a three-year vesting schedule.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Indianapolis

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $1175.1 reference price at 2026-08-17 and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Stock awards are grant-date accounting fair value estimated by Monte Carlo simulation, not cash received, and they settle only in February 2028 at between zero and 200 percent of target. The change in pension value is an actuarial movement rather than current cash, which is why the chief executive's $4.45 million pension line is larger than four of the five named executives' entire other-compensation figures. Realised value depends on vesting outcomes, the share price at settlement and the additional one-year post-vest holding requirement that applies to executive officers.

Board compensation framework

A non-employee director on no committee received $330,000 for 2025, two thirds of it in deferred stock units. Employee directors receive no additional board compensation. The 2026 increases to the stock grant and the lead independent director retainer take the standard package to $350,000 without touching the $800,000 plan cap.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one public data point on progression is that Lilly India reports 85 percent of leadership positions being filled internally, alongside vertical, lateral and international movement. That is a genuine signal about how the India organisation grows leaders, but it is a single-country statement and it says nothing about pay outcomes attached to those moves.

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 E1 named-executive and E2 chief executive rows from the source bundle are deliberately excluded from the band table. They are global proxy anchors that carry no city factor, so including them would have forced every offshore market's interpolated factor toward parity at the top of the ladder and produced absurd cells such as an India-based executive on a United States chief executive base. The disclosed executive packages are carried in full in the executive section instead, and the band ladder runs G0 to M3 with seniority capped at 10.
2. 2The source bundle's total-compensation figures were checked for the equity artefact where one global grant range is pasted into every city. It is not present here: base and total factors are effectively identical at the junior band in every market, and above it the total factor is generally the lower of the two, which is the opposite of what a pasted United States equity number would produce. Both calibrations are therefore retained as the bundle computed them.
3. 3Total compensation has been rebuilt from components so that base plus bonus plus equity reconciles to the total shown. Bonus is the midpoint of the modelled target range and equity is the residual. At G0 and P1 this leaves the total slightly below the bundle's own figure, by $2,800 and $3,300 respectively, because the bundle's operations and entry totals carry a small unallocated element that no disclosed component explains. No employer benefit load is included anywhere.
4. 4The G0 operations band behaves differently from the professional ladder, being hourly-paid with shift differentials that no modelled bonus target captures. It is retained because the bundle's own city factors were calibrated across it and fit it, but actual operator earnings in a plant running continuous operations can sit well above the modelled median.
5. 5Vendor H-1B figures conflict: MyVisaJobs reports a $135,969 FY2025 average and H1BGrader a $141,690 FY2026 median. Both are shown. Labour condition application counts, I-129 decisions and visible salary records are three different populations and are not reconciled into a single number.
6. 6Aggregator sample depth falls away sharply above M1. The M3 row deliberately carries a $360,000 to $650,000 total range rather than a false point estimate, and it is the only band classed Modeled rather than Reported at the anchor.
7. 7Benefit coverage is genuinely one-sided. The United States and Australia publish detailed rewards pages; ten of the eleven benefit regions disclose little or nothing beyond statutory floors. Those floors are legal minimums, not Lilly enhancements, and are labelled as such.
8. 8Founding year and legal-entity history are not stated in the metadata because the source bundle does not carry them. Only figures traceable to the bundle appear anywhere in this report.

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 — 20 sources

Headcount rose roughly 16 percent across two years while Lilly continued large manufacturing investment, including the Lebanon, Indiana district. About 12,000 employees sit in research and development and roughly 27,000 of the proxy population are based outside the United States. No company-wide attrition rate, average hike, pay freeze, salary cut or campus-offer revision was disclosed in any public source for 2025 or 2026.