wealthschema/archetypes/p-01-peak-earner-corporate-executive
P-01Accumulation PeakAccumulationvery-high tax complexity

Peak Earner — Corporate Executive

Senior corporate executive, deferred compensation, NQSO, large equity stake, complex tax situation, estate planning needs.

P-01 models the senior-corporate-executive household whose comp stack — base, bonus, RSUs, NQSOs, NQDC, SERP — generates a tax surface that ordinary high-W-2 fixtures miss. It's the canonical test profile for deferred-comp, 10b5-1, and 162(m)-adjacent flows.

Age Range
42–55
Net Worth
$5M–$30M
Cohort
Accumulation Peak

About this archetype

P-01 exists because senior corporate executives aren't just "high-W-2 earners" — their income is fragmented across instruments that mature on different schedules and tax differently. A typical P-01 record carries base salary, an annual STI bonus, an LTI grant denominated in RSUs and NQSOs, a §409A non-qualified deferred compensation election, and a SERP or supplemental DB benefit. The 162(m) $1M deduction cap applies on the employer side, Section 83 governs the equity vest, and §409A penalties are live whenever a deferral election is touched. Concentrated single-stock exposure (employer ticker) is the dominant balance-sheet feature, and 10b5-1 plans are how it gets unwound. Below this archetype, equity comp exists but rarely dominates the household balance sheet; above it (H-02/H-03), the structure tilts toward founder equity and trust-held interests rather than executive comp.

Cash-flow shape is bonus-dominated and lumpy. Median combined income sits at $618,713, but the corpus spreads from $425k to nearly $1M, with the upper tail driven by RSU vest events rather than salary growth. Mortgage balances are sized to NY/MA/CA jumbo limits — 96% of the corpus owns a primary residence and 56% sits in NY, MA, or CA, which is exactly where state tax and SALT-cap interactions bite hardest. Estate planning is active (ILITs and SLATs appear at this tier) but the household typically hasn't yet exhausted the lifetime exemption.

What makes P-01 distinct from neighbors is the *employer-driven* nature of the complexity. P-02 has the same wealth tier but the complexity is operator-owner — buy-sell agreements, key-person insurance, business-valuation discounts. P-03 has similar headline income but two W-2 stacks rather than one concentrated equity position. H-02 sits at the same net-worth band but has already crossed the family-office threshold and the comp instruments are largely past tense. P-01 is the *active executive* — still vesting, still subject to clawback, still inside the trading-window blackout calendar.

Defining characteristics

  • NQSO and deferred comp
    Non-qualified stock options and §409A deferred compensation are standard fixtures. Deferral elections are made the year before the comp is earned, and distribution schedules are locked years in advance — modeling either requires per-grant tracking, not aggregate balances.
  • SERP / supplemental DB
    Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans appear at most P-01 employers. These are unfunded promises subject to employer credit risk and don't roll over into IRAs — distribution-planning logic differs from qualified-plan rollovers.
  • Concentrated employer stock
    Single-stock exposure to the employer ticker typically anchors the household balance sheet. Unwinding requires 10b5-1 plans, exchange funds, or charitable-remainder structures rather than simple market sales.
  • Estate planning active
    Median net worth is $7.3M with the 75th percentile near $8M — the band where SLATs, ILITs, and annual-exclusion gifting programs are actively in motion but the lifetime exemption is not yet exhausted.
  • Charitable giving program
    Donor-advised funds and qualified charitable contributions of appreciated employer stock are the dominant giving vehicle, used as much for concentrated-position management as for tax efficiency.
  • Golden parachute exposure
    §280G change-in-control gross-ups and §4999 excise-tax exposure are part of the testing surface — relevant for severance modeling and pre-separation tax planning.

Corpus signature

n = 25 households

Aggregated across the 25 P-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.

Median income
$619k
p25–p75 $536k–$669k
Median net worth
$7.3M
mean $7.1M
Liquid net worth
$3.1M
median
Investable assets
$4.2M
median
Income distribution
$425k–575k
10
$575k–725k
10
$725k–875k
2
$875k–1.0m
3
Net-worth distribution
$3.8m–5.2m
5
$5.2m–6.6m
3
$6.6m–8m
10
$8m–9.5m
7
Goals across the corpus
Retirement25 / 25
Education funding23 / 25
Debt payoff18 / 25
Home purchase1 / 25
Liability composition
Credit cards25 / 25
Mortgages24 / 25
Student loans18 / 25
Auto loans4 / 25
  • 24 of 25 (96%) are homeowners; the remainder rent.
  • NY, MA, CA account for 14 of 25 households — 56% of the corpus.
  • Median adult-member age is 48 (range 40–57 across primaries and spouses).
  • 23 of 25 (92%) carry one or more dependents.
  • Married filing jointly is the dominant filing status (23 of 25).

Representative household

P-01-seed-12
Jessica T.Married filing jointly·New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY

Jessica and David sit at the income median of the P-01 corpus with net worth slightly below it — the diagnostic shape of a mid-vest executive. $620k of income against $740k of total liabilities and a $10.5M retirement target makes them flag as off-track for retirement and education despite the eight-figure goal, exactly the pattern that breaks naive 'they're fine, they earn $600k' UX. Test your accumulation-phase projections against this household to confirm they're not silently treating bonus and RSU income as guaranteed forward income.

Combined income
$618,713
Net worth
$6,615,397
Liquid NW
$2,778,946
Ages
45 / 40
Top goals on this household
Retirement
$10,463,700
Education funding
$262,500
Debt payoff
$9,116

Schema fields covered

Every P-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.

members[].age
income.combined_gross
net_worth.total
filing_status
accounts.taxable.lots[].acquisition_date
accounts.taxable.lots[].cost_basis
accounts.taxable.lots[].unrealized_pnl
taxes.wash_sale_flags

Who builds against this archetype

Three buyer profiles use P-01 most. Equity-management platforms validate RSU vest, NQSO exercise, ESPP qualifying-disposition, and 10b5-1 trading-plan flows against a household where those instruments actually dominate compensation rather than supplement it. Tax-software teams use the income mix — base, bonus, NQSO spread, deferred-comp distribution, §83(b) — to exercise the W-2 box-12 codes (V, Y, Z, EE) and the Schedule D ordinary/capital recharacterizations that high-W-2 fixtures otherwise skip. Wealth-platform engineering teams use P-01 to validate concentrated-position dashboards, blackout-window alerting, and the alternative-investment suitability gates that activate above $3M investable.

Testing scenarios this corpus is calibrated for

  • 01NQSO exercise modeling with bargain-element ordinary income, including same-day-sale, exercise-and-hold, and cashless-exercise variants
  • 02§409A deferred-comp distribution schedules with subsequent-deferral and acceleration-prohibition rules in effect
  • 0310b5-1 trading-plan rendering with cooling-off period, single-plan limitation, and good-faith-adoption attestations
  • 04162(m) employer-side deduction-cap modeling for grossed comp packages and §280G parachute-payment edge cases
  • 05Charitable-remainder strategies on appreciated employer stock with §170(e)(1) ordinary-income asset rules
  • 06SERP and supplemental DB benefit projections including employer credit-risk haircut

Edge cases and what's not in this corpus

P-01 is calibrated to current, active corporate executives — not retired or separated. Households that have already separated and rolled comp out belong in R-01 (corporate pre-retiree) or RE-01 if already retired. Founder-equity profiles where the concentrated position is private rather than public-company stock are P-02 or P-06 (sudden wealth from IPO). Tech-employee equity at less than C-suite scale lives in A-06. P-01 also assumes public-company employment — private-company executive comp with phantom-stock or SAR plans rather than RSU/NQSO grants is not modeled here. Finally, P-01 households carry active dependents 92% of the time; empty-nest executives in the same comp band are closer to P-05 by life-stage feel even though the comp instruments overlap.

Calibration notes

P-01 income bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to upper-end executive-compensation public data — proxy-statement summary-comp tables, ISS executive-comp summaries, and IRS SOI high-income returns. Geographic concentration in NY, MA, and CA mirrors where US public-company headquarters disproportionately sit and is intentional for SALT-cap and state-tax testing. Equity-comp instrument mix (RSU vs NQSO vs ESPP vs deferred) is modeled at the household level — not at the per-grant level, which is a deliberate simplification: the corpus doesn't carry individual vest schedules. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen and per-domain priors aren't independently auditable; treat calibration claims as descriptive of the synthesis intent rather than reproducible.

How this differs from related archetypes

Frequently asked questions

What does the P-01 archetype represent?+

P-01 — Peak Earner (Corporate Executive) is the senior corporate executive household: typically 42–55, married, with a compensation stack that includes base salary, annual cash bonus, RSU and NQSO grants, §409A non-qualified deferred compensation, and often a SERP or supplemental DB benefit. The defining feature is that comp is fragmented across instruments that tax and mature differently.

How is P-01 different from a generic high-W-2 fixture?+

Most high-income test fixtures collapse everything into salary plus a single bonus line. P-01 instead surfaces the equity-comp, deferred-comp, and supplemental-retirement instruments — RSU vest events, NQSO bargain-element ordinary income, §409A distribution schedules, §83(b) elections — that drive the actual tax and cash-flow shape of executive comp. If your software doesn't distinguish these, P-01 will surface that quickly.

What income range does the P-01 corpus cover?+

The 25 shipped P-01 households have a combined gross income median of $618,713, with a 25th-to-75th-percentile range of roughly $536k to $669k. The upper tail runs to nearly $1M, driven by RSU vest events rather than salary growth. Median net worth is $7.3M.

Where are P-01 households located?+

NY, MA, and CA account for 14 of 25 households — 56% of the corpus. The concentration is intentional: state-tax interaction with executive comp (e.g., NY trailing-comp sourcing on multi-state vests, CA NQSO sourcing rules) is part of the testing surface.

Which data sets include P-01 households?+

P-01 is tagged for six bundles — B02, B05, B07, B12, B16, and B20 — covering tax planning, executive compensation, alternative investments, estate planning, retirement contribution strategies, and equity compensation. See the right-hand sidebar for the data sets that ship P-01 households.

Is the P-01 corpus regenerable?+

No. The shipped v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09 per CLAUDE.md §9). Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI.

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