What Happened:
Meta cut broad-based RSU refreshers by roughly 5% for 2026, following a 10% cut in 2025, marking the second consecutive year of equity reductions for staff. The cuts came alongside an 8,000-employee layoff in April and a projected $115 to $135 billion AI capex budget for the year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said publicly that Meta has offered his researchers signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed the magnitude while clarifying that the structure is cash, equity, and retention vehicles spread across years, aimed at a frontier-researcher pool of fewer than 50 people globally.
For total rewards teams, this is now a budgeting and workforce-design question. Two grant philosophies have to coexist inside the same comp plan, executed across HRIS, equity admin, and comp planning tools.
More Insight:
The two-track equity picture has been building since Meta's first round of broad-based cuts in 2025, when refresher baselines dropped roughly 10% across all levels and international offices took sharper hits via country-multiplier reductions. "The worst way to learn about changes that impact your compensation is through a random newsletter," wrote Andre Nader, the former Meta engineer who runs FaangFire, after employees discovered the cuts in their performance summary documents. The 2026 cycle layered on another 5% reduction, and peers moved in the same direction. Teradata told 5,100 employees the 2026 raise budget was being redirected to AI investment.
The same labs running those cuts are writing the largest individual offers the industry has ever seen. Altman said publicly that Meta approached his researchers with signing bonuses at $100 million and annual packages above that. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth pushed back on the framing without disputing the magnitude. The structure was "all these different things," he said, combining cash, backloaded equity, and multi-year retention vehicles. Pave's compensation data already shows median equity for ML engineers running higher than software engineers at public companies, and the frontier-researcher tier sits at a different order of magnitude entirely.
The broad-based RSU refresh has been the retention spine of the tech sector for a decade, and shrinking it changes the math on engineering attrition, internal equity perception, and equity admin workload. Comp planning tools have to support a top tier that can absorb a nine-figure package without breaking pay-band logic, and an everyone-else tier where refresher cuts of 5 to 10% land in performance summary documents employees read individually.
The friction is already showing up in vendor data. Pave has flagged that an AI researcher making double a senior engineer on an adjacent team causes internal-equity questions comp leaders did not have to answer two years ago. HRIS systems are being asked to render the gap cleanly. Equity admin platforms are being asked to handle backloaded multi-year vehicles next to standard four-year RSU grants.
This is what total rewards at big tech looks like in 2026, and it's only going to look more like this in 2027.