How FedEx Pays

Professional and technical ladder — B3 through B8

Leadership ladder — B9 through B11

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The B-codes are a crosswalk, not a FedEx policy. FedEx has never published a global grade catalogue, a grade-to-salary schedule or a cross-country grade equivalence table, and the source bundle says so explicitly on its first page.
• Only two title families are directly observed. Public engineering salary records evidence L1 through L6 in the United States and L1 through L4 in India; official postings evidence the Advisor family. Everything between the Advisor level and Vice President is inferred from title patterns.
• Managing Director is the pivotal internal threshold. FedEx used managing director and above as the eligibility line for a roughly 1,100-person one-time FY2026 cash bonus pool, which makes it the only mid-level grade boundary the company has effectively confirmed in a filing.
• Two reorganisations sit behind the current structure. Express, Ground and Services consolidated into Federal Express on 1 June 2024 and FedEx Freight separated on 1 June 2026, so legacy pay architectures can coexist. European and Australian operating titles can still carry TNT heritage, and no public table maps TNT grades to FedEx grades.
• The frontline, courier and pilot populations are described here but not priced in the band table. Their pay is hourly, contractual or collectively bargained, and it moves in the opposite direction to salaried pay across markets, so it cannot share one geographic factor.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Memphis

FedEx discloses no employee headcount for any city or country in this table, so market presence is described by function and by the evidence that supports it rather than by size. Liège is identified officially as the central European air hub, Hoofddorp and Singapore as international support locations, Collierville and Plano as technology and corporate centres, and Memphis as the global headquarters and primary sorting facility. The source bundle prices 42 locations across 18 countries; the 30 here are the ones with a distinguishable evidence posture.

Memphis anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Memphis is the anchor because it is the global headquarters, the primary worldwide air sorting hub and the deepest source of public United States salary evidence. Every factor in the location table is expressed against it and the anchor itself sits at 1.00.
• The United States cities are priced by labour market rather than by FedEx data: Pittsburgh and Moon Township, and Dallas and Plano, at 1.05; Indianapolis at 0.98; Los Angeles at 1.18; Collierville at parity with Memphis because it sits inside the same metro.
• India, Australia and the United States carry direct third-party observations. India has L1 through L4 engineering submissions, Australia has SEEK job-ad ranges across operations, engineering and coordinator roles, and the United States has L1 through L6 plus two directly observed Advisor wages from H-1B filings.
• Every other market is a labour-market calibration. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil and New Zealand have sparse public FedEx role anchors, and their factors should be read as directional.
• FX is a single snapshot at 21 August 2026, with the Philippine peso taken at 26 August 2026 and the dirham at its official peg. Federal Reserve H.10 quotes the Australian and New Zealand dollars, the euro and sterling as United States dollars per local unit, and those quotes were inverted. It is a reference rate, not a payroll rate.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• There is no employee stock purchase plan. Nothing in the 2019 Omnibus Stock Incentive Plan disclosures, the proxy or the Form 10-K evidences a discounted purchase plan open to the general workforce, so the ESPP line that most large United States issuers carry is simply absent at FedEx.
• FY2026 stock compensation expense was $177 million against $94.7 billion of revenue, or roughly 0.19 percent. That ratio is the clearest single indicator that equity is not part of the ordinary FedEx package.
• The FedEx Freight separation on 1 June 2026 adjusted outstanding awards to preserve intrinsic economic value. Award counts and strike prices either side of that date are therefore not directly comparable.
• A descriptive capacity ratio at 31 May 2026 is 46.8 percent of option capacity outstanding and 15.7 percent of full-value capacity unvested. These are not official utilisation rates: plan share-counting and recycling rules change what capacity means.
• Plan overhang was reported at 8.01 percent on 3 August 2026.

Stock plan balances at 31 May 2026

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The transition-year 2026 grants are prorated for a seven-month period and vest over three years rather than four, so they are not directly comparable with a normal FedEx annual grant on either size or pace. The vehicle also changed: FedEx moved from restricted stock with company-paid related taxes to restricted stock units without that tax payment, which is a real reduction in delivered value at the same share count.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• B3 to B7: no standard grant evidenced. Public salary submissions show little or no recurring stock at the observed L1 and L2 grades, and no verified grant schedule exists for Engineer III, Advisor, Principal or Manager II. Discretionary awards are not ruled out; they are simply not disclosed.
• B8 Managing Director and Senior Manager: no standard equity grant evidenced. What this population did receive in FY2026 was a one-time cash bonus pool covering about 1,100 people, which is a cash instrument, not equity.
• B9 Director and Senior Director: no standard director-level grant schedule is publicly disclosed anywhere in the filings.
• B10 Vice President: selective eligibility begins. Officer grants can support annual, hire, promotion, retention or exceptional-performance purposes at committee discretion, and no standardised value is published.
• B11 Senior Vice President and above: explicitly included in the 2025 Equity Incentive Industry Leadership Program, the only occasion on which FedEx has named a non-executive population as equity-eligible. Individual programme values were not disclosed.
• B12 and B13: annual executive equity plus special programmes, disclosed unit by unit on Forms 4. The transition-year 2026 benchmark was 4,734 restricted stock units and 3,478 to 3,567 options for an executive vice president, and 14,591 units and 10,725 options for the chief executive.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Memphis

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $337.96 reference price at 2026-08-26 and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Executive compensation is reviewed at least annually and FY2026 salary increases took effect on 1 October 2025. The chief executive received a 5 percent merit increase effective 1 October 2025 and the board has approved a further 3 percent to $1,622,250 effective 1 October 2026; other named executives generally received 3 percent on the same 2025 date. Two of the six named executives in the FY2026 table are former officers: John W. Dietrich separated on 31 July 2026 and Sriram Krishnasamy had left the Chief Transformation Officer role, which is why his $13,045,095 total is almost entirely stock, options and other compensation with no incentive payout at all.

Board compensation framework

Outside-director totals combine cash retainers and meeting fees with restricted stock units that generally vest after one year. The $335,305 figure recurs across four directors and is effectively the base package; lead-director duty, committee chairmanships and partial-year service account for the spread up to $410,305. Non-management directors are named as eligible participants in the 2019 Omnibus Stock Incentive Plan, which is why their equity sits under the same plan as executive awards.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The one directly observed promotion policy in the entire source bundle is a customs-brokerage posting stating a 7 percent increase per promotional grade. That is a single role in a single business, not an enterprise rule, and it sits well below the 10 to 25 percent that a market move between the same two levels would typically pay. Modeled promotion timing runs 2 to 4 years per step from B3 through B8 and 3 to 6 years per step from B8 upward, with a 7 to 15 percent market uplift below Vice President and 10 to 25 percent or more above it. Every figure in that sentence except the 7 percent is a model output.

Dataset summary

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The band table deliberately excludes the frontline and agent population that the source bundle prices as B1 and B2. Their geography runs the opposite way to the salaried ladder: a Sydney frontline role prices about 10 percent above Memphis while a Sydney Director prices about 11 percent below it, and hourly, contractual and collectively bargained pay cannot share one interpolated location factor with salaried bands. The disclosed characteristics of that population, including the $50,373 median employee, the 78 percent part-time turnover and the roughly 5,000 pilots under the June 2026 agreement, are carried in the career-levels, key-metrics, nuances and news sections instead.
2. 2The Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer rows are also excluded from the band table. The source bundle applies city factors to them and produces cells such as a São Paulo chief executive on R$141.82 million, which is an artefact of multiplying one global negotiated package by a country factor. Those packages are carried at their disclosed values in the executive and equity sections, and the location interpolation therefore runs from B3 to B11 only.
3. 3Total factors are set equal to base factors in every market. The source bundle's own city calibration produced identical base and total factors at every band in every city, which is what you would expect when no routine equity exists below Vice President, so there is no real divergence to preserve.
4. 4No employer benefit loading is included in any total. The source bundle defines its total as base plus likely variable plus standard benefit and equity value where the data supports it, which is employer cost rather than pay. Every total here is rebuilt so that base plus incentive plus equity reconciles exactly, which is why the B9 Memphis total shown is $305,500 rather than the bundle's $360,000.
5. 5The B10 and B11 equity figures are residuals, not disclosed grants. FedEx publishes no officer grant value below named-executive rank, so the $240,000 at Vice President and $1,555,000 at Senior Vice President are what remains of the source bundle's officer totals once base and the target incentive are removed. Treat them as an envelope for a selective award, not as an expected annual grant.
6. 6India's mid-ladder observations sit above the interpolated line. Bangalore's observed L3 and L4 engineering pay runs at roughly 38 to 45 percent of Memphis while the B3 to B11 interpolation puts those bands nearer 22 to 25 percent. The linear model cannot hold both endpoints and the mid-ladder spike, and the endpoints were preserved because they carry the senior and junior evidence.
7. 7The Philippines shows a genuine inversion at B6 that this report does not reproduce. Manila's observed Advisor and Operations Manager pay sits below its Engineer III pay in the source data, because the two titles draw on different local labour markets. The interpolated factor smooths that away, so the Manila B6 cell is optimistic.
8. 8The proxy uses two different chief-executive totals. The Summary Compensation Table reports $27,554,018 and the pay-ratio disclosure uses $27,575,017, a $20,999 difference that the filing does not explain. Both are shown here rather than reconciled.
9. 9The annual and long-term components of the non-equity incentive are split only for the chief executive. For the other named executives the proxy reports a combined figure, so the incentive outcome table shows the combined amount against the annual target and flags the residual rather than allocating it.
10. 10City and country headcount is not disclosed anywhere, so the thirty markets in the location table are ranked by evidence posture and function rather than by office population. Market presence descriptions are drawn from official facility identifications, H-1B worksite counts and posting activity.
11. 11The source bundle prices 42 locations across 18 countries; this report carries the 30 with a distinguishable evidence posture. Cologne, Montreal, Brisbane, Osaka, Toluca, Clark, Nuneaton, Amsterdam, Beijing, Harrison, Colorado Springs and Atherstone are described in the text where relevant but are not priced separately, because their factors are simple derivatives of a neighbouring city.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-21, except the Philippine peso at 2026-08-26 and the dirham at its official peg

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 — 23 sources

FedEx does not disclose headcount by country, by city or by band, and the FY2026 figure spans a company that changed shape twice inside two years. The comparison that matters for pay is not the total but the mix: 469,000 hires against roughly 530,000 permanent employees, and 78 percent part-time turnover, describe an organisation whose median employee is a part-year frontline worker. That is the arithmetic behind the 547 to 1 pay ratio, and it is also why the salaried ladder in this report describes only a minority of the workforce.