How General Dynamics Pays

Entry ladder — B0 through B1

Professional ladder — B2 through B5

Principal and management ladder — B6 through B7

Leadership ladder — B8 through B9

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• General Dynamics operates through Aerospace, Marine Systems, Combat Systems and Technologies businesses with acquired title systems, and public filings do not describe a completed enterprise-wide band harmonisation or a single grade dictionary. The B0 to B9 bridge exists for comparison only.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for engineering, software and program roles, where postings and visa filings are dense, and least reliable in craft, production and shipyard trades, where a contractual classification rather than a grade determines the rate.
• Roughly 23 percent of employees were covered by collective-bargaining agreements at year-end 2025. Their wage steps, premiums, leave and progression are set by contract, so this ladder does not describe them and should not be quoted at them.
• The B10 and B11 named-executive tiers used in the source research have been kept out of this band table on purpose. They are single worldwide proxy figures, and multiplying them by a city calibration factor would produce nonsense such as a Mexicali chief executive rate. They appear in full in the Executive Compensation section instead.
• Vice president, segment president and chief executive are corporate titles rather than hidden grade numbers, so this report treats the top of the ladder as a title tier rather than claiming a numeric band.
• Business-unit presidents set much of their own pay architecture. Any statement that begins "General Dynamics pays" is really a statement about one of five or six quite different labour markets held inside one holding company.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Reston

General Dynamics does not publish city-by-city employee counts. The presence ranking here is inferred from Form 10-K property disclosures, business descriptions and recruiting volume, and points to Savannah, Groton, Bath, San Diego and the Virginia federal corridor as the largest United States concentrations, with London Ontario, the UK defence sites, MOWAG in Switzerland, the Spanish land-systems plants and Mexicali as the material international operations.

Reston anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Reston column is the anchor. B2 through B7 medians rest on Levels.fyi United States software and engineering records, Gulfstream Savannah posted ranges rebased from the 0.88 Savannah factor, NASSCO San Diego employee reports rebased from 1.10, and GDIT labour condition application wages in the Virginia and Maryland federal corridor.
• San Diego at 1.10 is the highest United States factor in the set and Bath at 0.86 the lowest, so the same NASSCO and Bath Iron Works job families sit roughly 28 percent apart on the same corporate ladder. Savannah at 0.88, Groton at 0.92 and Sterling Heights and Pittsfield at 0.90 fill the middle.
• Kreuzlingen is the only non-United States market that calibrates at parity with Reston, on MOWAG engineering records of CHF 112,000 to CHF 124,000 for a senior engineer. Mexicali at 0.22 is the lowest, on employee-reported engineer ranges of MX$243,000 to MX$477,000.
• Every factor is flat across the ladder. The source research publishes a single calibration per city rather than a junior-to-senior curve, so no baseFactorTop or totalFactorTop is set here and the offshore compression pattern seen in services companies is deliberately not asserted.
• India was dropped from this location table. The Form 10-K shows a legal-entity footprint but establishes no material India property or operating hub, and the only salary evidence is a handful of very-low-confidence third-party samples. Carrying it would have implied a delivery centre that the filings do not support.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• Remaining capacity is comfortable rather than tight: 12,745,050 shares available against 1,327,450 options granted during FY2025 implies most of a decade of headroom at the current grant rate, so there is no near-term pressure to seek a new share authorisation.
• FY2025 exercises of 2,346,690 shares ran well ahead of the 1,327,450 options granted, which is what a long-tenured executive population does when the share price has roughly doubled against older strikes.
• Net-of-tax equity compensation expense was $155 million against $52.6 billion of revenue. That is a very small equity charge for a company of this size, and it is the clearest single indicator that grants do not reach far down the organisation.
• Performance stock units are shown at a 1,200,317 maximum rather than a target, so the outstanding-rights figure overstates what will actually settle if performance lands below maximum.

2012 Equity Compensation Plan capacity and FY2025 activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

This is a slower and more back-loaded schedule than the quarterly or annual cadences common in technology. An executive who leaves before the second anniversary takes nothing from that year's grant, which makes the two-year mark a real retention hinge. Options carry a ten-year term, so the value depends on the share price a decade out rather than on a settlement date, and the FY2025 grants were made in early March at a $257.55 strike against a $381.68 reference price in August 2026.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• The plan permits awards to directors, officers and selected key employees. No minimum eligible grade, no standard grant table and no typical grant size below named-executive level is filed, so nobody outside the executive group can look up what they should expect.
• Employee-reported data for mainstream General Dynamics engineering and software roles shows little or no recurring equity, which is consistent with the small $155 million expense. This report therefore models zero equity at B0 through B8 and only introduces a component at B9.
• The 401(k) GD Stock Fund is the arrangement most employees actually touch, and it is bought with their own and the employer's retirement contributions at market price. Reading it as a free share grant is the single most common error about General Dynamics equity.
• Annual long-term grants for the disclosed executives are made in early March. No grant calendar is published for anyone else, because no routine grant for anyone else is evidenced.
• Valuing a grant at spot is misleading here. The proxy's grant-date fair values are the accounting disclosure; multiplying units by the August 2026 price ignores the three-year performance period, the two- and three-year option cliffs, option time value and forfeiture.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Reston

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $381.68 reference price at 26 August 2026 reference price and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Phebe N. Novakovic has been chairman and chief executive since 2013 and remained in both roles after Danny Deep, president of Combat Systems, was elected to the board on 6 August 2026. Three of the five named executives are business-group leaders rather than corporate functional heads, which is consistent with a holding company that pushes operating authority down to the segments. David A. Kuryea, as Senior Vice President for Human Resources and Administration, is the officer whose disclosure most directly bears on pay policy, and he is compensated on a corporate rather than a segment scorecard.

Board compensation framework

Director pay is a governance package, not an employment band, and is excluded from the band chart. The narrow $57,500 spread across twelve directors indicates a standard annual retainer with modest committee and chair premiums rather than performance-linked variation. Directors receive equity under the same 2012 plan as officers.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

The only visible calendar belongs to the executives: annual incentive performance is measured over the calendar year and annual long-term grants are made in early March, with FY2025 options struck at $257.55. Everything below that runs on business-unit cycles that are not published. Union and collective-bargaining units follow contract timing entirely, which is why a Bath Iron Works or Electric Boat increase can arrive years out of step with a corporate merit budget and at a completely different size.

Dataset summary

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The two supplied research bundles are byte-identical, so there was no second source to reconcile against and no bundle-level disagreement to resolve. Every figure here traces to a single research pass over the underlying filings.
2. 2The named-executive tiers used in the source research as B10 and B11 have been removed from the band table on purpose. They are single worldwide proxy figures, and this report's location factors are flat across the ladder, so keeping them would have multiplied a chief executive salary by a Mexicali or Merthyr Tydfil factor. They are carried in full in the Executive Compensation section instead, and the employee ladder tops out at B9 with a seniority of 10.
3. 3Negotiated shipyard and craft wage scales are deliberately excluded from the salaried anchors. Roughly 23 percent of employees are covered by collective-bargaining agreements whose steps move on contract cycles — 17 percent in one year at Bath Iron Works, about 30 percent over five years at Electric Boat — and folding those into the same interpolated ladder would misstate both populations. They are carried in careerLevels, benefits and news instead.
4. 4India was dropped from the location table. The source research retains it at a 0.12 factor with a very-low-confidence warning, but the Form 10-K establishes only a legal-entity footprint with no material property or operating hub, and the only pay evidence is a handful of AmbitionBox samples. Showing an India column would have implied a delivery centre the filings do not support.
5. 5Base factor and total factor are identical in every market because the source model publishes one calibration per city. No baseFactorTop or totalFactorTop is set, so no level-dependent geographic compression is asserted. If a real junior-to-senior compression curve exists at General Dynamics, this report does not measure it.
6. 6The source research's stated variable-pay ranges do not always reconcile with its own modelled totals. B1 is quoted at 0 to 5 percent of base while the modelled $55,000 base and $59,000 total imply 7.3 percent. This report rebuilds usTotal from its components so base plus bonus plus equity reconciles exactly, and shows the source's stated ranges separately in the variable pay section.
7. 7Named-executive incentive targets are derived from the disclosed payout percentages rather than from base salary times target percentage, because the two do not agree. Novakovic at $3,236,723 and Kuryea at $1,231,339 reconcile with their target percentages almost exactly, but Aiken, Burns and Deep imply a lower target base than their reference salary, which is consistent with mid-year salary increases. The attainment percentages shown are the disclosed ones.
8. 8No notional employer benefit load is included in usTotal. Total compensation is base plus target cash variable plus any annualised equity, so the figures are pay rather than employer cost and reconcile component by component.
9. 9H-1B 25th and 75th percentiles could not be reproduced from the public aggregator pages, so the city percentile table is empty rather than populated with invented quantiles. The city and title records appear in the examples table instead.
10. 10General Dynamics discloses no geographic revenue split in any reviewed source, so no regional revenue panel is shown.
11. 11The workforce figure of approximately 117,000 at 31 December 2025 and the more-than-120,000 statement in the 6 August 2026 release refer to different dates and are shown separately rather than blended.
12. 12No company-wide FY2026 salary hike, pay freeze, salary cut or campus-offer revision was identified in any source. Labour-contract increases are local and do not generalise to the salaried population.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-27

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 — 17 sources

Headcount grew about 5 percent between 2023 and 2025 while gross hiring fell by a fifth in the final year, which points to lower churn rather than a hiring freeze. General Dynamics does not publish city-level headcount, so the only geographic signal in the filings is that about 84 percent of employees are in the United States and that operations reach more than 65 countries. Voluntary attrition is not disclosed for any year, and IT-services attrition benchmarks should not be substituted for it.