# Equity is now most of your comp — how to read an FDE offer

> At the top of the market, equity is 55–70% of an FDE package. Read the offer by its cash and you'll misjudge it by a factor of two or three.

**Category:** Compensation
**Published:** 2026-07-12
**Author:** Pierre-Thomas Liger-Belair

The FDE comp gap between a strong enterprise and a frontier lab is enormous, and it's almost entirely equity. Palantir's classic FDSE is cash-heavy at ~$211K median total comp; an OpenAI or Anthropic FDE lands at $350–550K mid-to-senior — the difference is stock.

So read the equity. What's the grant, over what vesting, with what cliff? Is the headline "total comp" the annualized grant value or something realizable? For a private lab, what's the last valuation, the liquidity path, and the refresh policy — because a grant that never refreshes decays fast.

Then adjust for reality. A tax-free Gulf package at $100K cash lands closer to a taxed $140–160K in take-home; a $200K SF base costs a third of itself to the Bay Area. The offer letter's biggest number is rarely the one that matters.

The discipline is simple: convert every offer to the same terms — realizable, after tax, after cost of living — before you compare. Most candidates skip that step and choose wrong.

## Sources

2026 FDE compensation report; Levels.fyi; frontier-lab disclosures.

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Source: https://forward-deployed-engineer.tech/news/how-to-read-an-fde-offer
Publication: Forward Deployed — the publication of record for Forward Deployed Engineering.
Editor: Pierre-Thomas Liger-Belair.
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