Amazon more than doubles salary caps to $350,000 for US white-collar employees

By Brian Fung, CNN Business

Amazon is dramatically increasing salary caps for its US-based technology and corporate workforce, in a nod to how the pandemic has exacerbated an already fierce competition for talent nationwide.

The e-commerce and cloud computing giant announced in an internal blog post Monday that the company’s maximum base pay in the United States is more than doubling, to $350,000 a year from $160,000.

The blog post, a copy of which CNN reviewed, added that Amazon is also “increasing overall compensation ranges for most jobs globally, and the increases are much more considerable than we’ve done in the past.” Those changes apply to Amazon corporate and technology employees worldwide.

“This past year has seen a particularly competitive labor market, and in doing a thorough analysis of various options, weighing the economics of our business and the need to remain competitive for attracting and retaining top talent, we decided to make meaningfully bigger increases to our compensation levels than we do in a typical year,” the internal post said.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel declined to comment on the blog post but confirmed its authenticity.

It’s not clear how many Amazon employees may directly benefit from the change or will soon earn the top-tier pay rate, but the blog post said Amazon’s base pay cap had been kept at $160,000 “for several years.”

The change comes as Amazon kicks off its annual performance evaluation season this week. An additional change, the blog post said, is that employees who are promoted into a new pay band will see the results of that promotion in the year it occurs through the granting of additional mid-year stock compensation. Previously, the post said, promotions only provided “a base pay increase prior to the next annual compensation cycle.”

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