How General Mills Pays

Operating and professional pay grades — PG35 through PG80

Leadership layers — Director through EVP (analyst-normalised, not company grades)

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Reviewed career postings expose General Mills pay grades from PG35 to PG80 and nothing above. No complete global grade manual, experience matrix or leadership-grade mapping was found in any reviewed source.
• The same grade can contain commercial, supply-chain, technology, finance, R&D or manufacturing work. Plant operations, brand management and data science do not sit on a single clean technical ladder, so a PG60 title tells you the scope band and very little about the function.
• Lower grades can still include supervisory roles in manufacturing. The available postings do not establish one enterprise-wide point at which people leadership begins.
• No reliable public source identified a predecessor-company grade system or a formal harmonisation programme following General Mills acquisitions and divestitures. A legacy-grade crosswalk is not publicly disclosed.
• Director through EVP are analyst layers. They are fitted between the PG80 posting evidence and the filed officer disclosures, and should never be quoted back as General Mills grade names.
• The CEO row is deliberately absent from the band table. It is one worldwide filed figure, and interpolating it into every city would put an India country lead on a US chief executive base.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Minneapolis

Four locations in the source bundle were dropped from this report. Bangalore, Auckland, Singapore and Dubai were carried in the bundle as selector placeholders explicitly flagged as comparison markets with no confirmed General Mills office, and pricing a company's pay in a city where it has no evidenced employing entity is not a benchmark. São Paulo and Shanghai are retained but both carry announced portfolio actions that may change their status.

Minneapolis anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• Minneapolis is the anchor. PG35 through PG80 medians are fitted to public US salary records, with Levels.fyi showing a General Mills median total compensation of about $140,700 at 26 August 2026 and Comparably estimating average base-plus-bonus at $116,471 against a $109,332 median.
• The six other US sites are manufacturing and distribution markets, calibrated at 0.87 to 0.94 of the Minneapolis base. Crucially they move in the same direction as the corporate anchor at every grade, so a single ladder is correct here; they are not a frontline population running the opposite way.
• Mumbai is the largest disclosed India professional hub and the only India location with a confirmed General Mills employing entity alongside the Nashik plant. Indeed's indexed India page ran from about 3.93 lakh rupees for an Executive to 16.71 lakh for a Senior Analyst.
• Sydney and Rooty Hill form the clearest Australian concentration. SEEK estimated A$65,000 to A$80,000 for manufacturing operators, A$90,000 to A$100,000 for team leaders, A$95,000 to A$120,000 for supply planners and A$120,000 to A$140,000 for managers, which is why Australia prices above Minneapolis at the junior grades and below it at the top.
• Nyon is the only market modelled above the anchor, at 1.10 times Minneapolis base, reflecting an international headquarters role mix in a premium Swiss labour market.
• Exact city headcounts are not publicly disclosed anywhere. This catalogue therefore ranks nothing by employee count and describes each site by operating character instead.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• The 35 million share reserve is an initial authorisation from 2022, not current availability. The FY2026 filings reviewed here contain no usable table of the unused pool or the utilisation rate, so no availability percentage is quoted in this report.
• General Mills told shareholders in 2022 that it expected the reserve to fund grants for at least five years, which places the natural refresh conversation somewhere around 2027.
• About 1,900 of approximately 32,500 employees were identified as potential recipients at the time of the 2022 proposal. That is roughly 6 percent of the workforce, and it is the single most useful number in the whole equity section for anyone below the manager layer.
• Clawback runs on two tracks: mandatory recovery on a financial restatement, plus broader cancellation and recoupment powers for misconduct.
• Minimum share ownership is 10 times salary for the chief executive, 5 times for the chief executive's senior leadership team and 3 times for other corporate officers. Executives retain 50 percent of net after-tax award shares until the guideline is met, and named executives hold vested performance shares for at least one year. Hedging and pledging are prohibited.

2022 Stock Compensation Plan and FY2026 grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule above is the named-executive design. The plan's own floor is looser: employee options, appreciation rights, restricted stock and restricted stock units generally vest over at least three years, with a 5 percent exception carve-out, and the individual award agreement controls. A performance share unit is not a slower restricted stock unit; the last three completed cycles paid 200 percent, 89 percent and 23 percent of target, so half of a named executive's long-term incentive has swung by a factor of nearly nine in three years.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• PG35 through PG65: no routine annual grant is publicly evidenced. An exceptional or spot award is possible on performance, retention or critical-skill grounds, but no threshold or frequency is disclosed.
• PG70: selective eligibility, modelled at a $10,000 median and up to $25,000, tied to critical talent, manager or expert scope, performance and retention.
• PG80: selective eligibility, modelled at a $25,000 median and up to $75,000 on the same criteria.
• Director and Senior Director: likely regular for selected roles at a modelled $50,000 and $125,000 median, but the exact threshold at which grants become routine is not publicly disclosed.
• VP and SVP: likely regular at a modelled $300,000 and $850,000 median, driven by role level, market, succession criticality and performance.
• EVP and C-suite: regular committee-approved awards on the 50 / 25 / 25 performance share, restricted stock unit and option mix, modelled at a $2.8 million median.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Minneapolis

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $39.87 reference price at 26 August 2026 market snapshot and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The retention awards are the tell. Granting $3.5 million, $2.5 million and $1.7 million of three-year cliff equity to Bruce, Montemayor and Wilson Thissen in June 2026, in the same year that the annual incentive paid 58 percent of target and the closing performance share cycle paid 23 percent, is a board using selective retention to hold a senior team together through a transformation rather than expanding pay broadly. Ownership discipline is real: at 31 July 2026 actual multiples were 22 times salary for Harmening against a 10 times requirement, 10 times for Bruce, 9 times for Montemayor, 5 times for Wilson Thissen and 3 times for McNabb.

Board compensation framework

Director pay is roughly 64 percent cash and 36 percent equity at the base package, which is a far more cash-weighted mix than the executive design and reflects a governance retainer rather than a performance instrument. Directors may take stock in lieu of cash under the 2022 Plan.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Executive timing is the one clear signal: compensation actions are approved in June, alongside the new one- and three-year goals, which is also when the annual long-term incentive grant is normally made. Employee review timing is not published anywhere, and the India Center's reference to zone promotions suggests grade movement can happen on a different cadence from merit increases.

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 excluded from the band table. In the source bundle it is a single filed worldwide figure repeated identically in all 23 city tables, and interpolating it would force every location's senior factor toward 1.0 and put, for example, an India country lead on a US chief executive base. It is carried in the executive section instead, and the vice-president layer is the top employee band the geographic factors interpolate to.
2. 2The source bundle computed its total-reward column as base plus incentive plus equity plus a notional 11 to 13 percent employer benefit load. That is employer cost rather than pay, so it has been stripped and every total here is rebuilt from its own components. A Minneapolis PG60 therefore shows $134,400 in this report against $148,800 in the bundle, and the whole difference is the removed load.
3. 3For every market whose base factor is flat across the ladder, the bundle's total factor drifted upward at senior grades only because it applied a US-denominated equity grant to those cities unchanged. That is an artefact of the model rather than a geographic fact, so those markets carry one factor taken from the bundle's own base-pay calibration. Only Mumbai, Nashik, Sydney and Melbourne, where the base gap itself is level-dependent, carry separate junior and senior factors.
4. 4Four bundle locations were dropped. Bangalore, Auckland, Singapore and Dubai were carried as user-interface selector placeholders and explicitly flagged in the bundle as comparison markets where no General Mills office was confirmed. Bangalore was in fact the bundle's default selection, which is a specification artefact rather than a statement about where General Mills employs people.
5. 5Plant and corporate populations are modelled on one ladder here, and that is the correct call for this company rather than a shortcut. The six non-headquarters US sites, the Nashik plant and the Arras plant all sit at a flat discount to their corporate anchor and move in the same direction at every grade; they are lower-cost versions of the same curve, not a frontline population running the other way. What the single ladder does not capture is shift premiums, overtime and plant-specific allowances, none of which are publicly quantified.
6. 6Only one worksite has a full H-1B wage distribution. The four other worksites in the MyVisaJobs snapshot publish counts of two filings each and no percentiles, so they appear in the dataset notes rather than the city table.
7. 7There is no discrepancy between bundles to record, because only one research bundle exists for General Mills. That is itself a limitation: no second source independently reproduced the PG35 to PG80 posting evidence or the city calibration factors used here.
8. 8General Mills' fiscal-year end date and founding year are not stated in the reviewed sources, so neither is asserted in this report. FY2026 results were released on 1 July 2026 and the proxy was filed on 13 August 2026.

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 — 33 sources

General Mills publishes no attrition rate, and as a packaged-food manufacturer rather than a services business it has no quarterly attrition metric to publish. The workforce decline of roughly 4,000 across two years is driven by announced restructuring, supply-chain consolidation and divestiture rather than by voluntary turnover, and city-level headcount is not disclosed anywhere.