How a grant becomes shares
Each Meta RSU becomes one share of Class A stock (META) when it vests. The shares show up in your Schwab account within 30 days, minus the ones Meta keeps for taxes.
You can see the share count and vesting dates for each grant in your award notice and your Schwab account. Your new-hire grant and each refresher vest on their own schedules, so it’s worth adding them all up to see what’s coming each quarter. Until a grant vests it isn’t yours, so I’d keep unvested RSUs out of your budget.
Grant
You’re told how many RSUs you’ll get and when they vest.
Vest
Shares land in your account within 30 days, minus what’s withheld for taxes.
Hold or sell
The shares are yours, and you decide what to do with them.
The vesting schedule
Meta RSUs vest quarterly over four years. You get one-sixteenth of the grant on February 15, May 15, August 15, and November 15, and there’s no one-year cliff, so your first shares arrive within a few months of starting. On a $400,000 grant, that’s $25,000 of stock each quarter at the grant price.
What your award agreement says
These are the main terms in Meta’s standard RSU agreement. Your own notice and agreement can differ, so read them before you take a leave or resign.
- Settlement
- You receive Class A shares, which trade as META, within 30 days of each vest date.
- Withholding
- Meta holds back some of your shares to pay the taxes due at vesting, so you receive fewer shares than vested. In 2025 it paid $18.4 billion in taxes this way across all employees.
- Leave of absence
- The agreement doesn’t say what happens to vesting during a leave, so check with HR before you take a long one.
- Leaving
- You forfeit any RSUs that haven’t vested when you stop working, along with their dividend equivalents. Vesting doesn’t continue through a notice period unless local law requires it.
- Transfer
- You can’t sell, pledge, or give away RSUs before they vest. Once they’ve vested, the shares are yours to sell or give, as long as you follow the trading policy.
- If Meta is acquired
- Your RSUs don’t automatically vest. The buyer can take them over or replace them, and they only accelerate if the buyer declines to do that.
- Purchase plan
- Meta doesn’t have an employee stock purchase plan, so any ESPP advice you read for other tech companies doesn’t apply.
Company-wide figures from Meta’s 2025 annual report. Meta had 78,865 employees at year end and 454 million Class A shares reserved for future awards.
If you received stock options in 2026
Meta started granting stock options to some executives and employees in 2026. An option lets you buy a share at a set price, so it’s only worth something if the stock trades above that price. You don’t owe tax when options are granted. When you exercise, the difference between the stock price and your exercise price is taxed as wages. If you leave, you generally have 90 days to exercise the ones that have vested, and exercising and selling counts as a trade, so it has to happen in an open window.
Refresher grants
Meta gives full-time employees a new RSU grant each year, called a refresher, on top of the grant you got when you were hired. In 2025 they were granted in March.
Your refresher is set as a dollar amount and then converted into a number of RSUs using the stock price shortly after earnings. For the 2025 refreshers, Meta used $701.32, which was the average closing price over the seven trading days after its fourth-quarter earnings. After that, the value of the grant moves with the stock.
The median is for all employees worldwide other than the CEO.
Refreshers aren’t guaranteed. Getting one this year doesn’t mean you’ll get one next year, the size can change, and like any other grant, you lose whatever hasn’t vested if you leave.
I’d treat a refresher as money you haven’t earned yet. If your mortgage payment or lifestyle depends on getting a similar grant every year, a smaller grant or a lower stock price can leave you short. A more useful number to track is the total value of all your grants vesting over the next twelve months.
Dividends on Meta RSUs
Meta RSUs do earn dividends. Meta pays $0.525 per share each quarter, and your unvested RSUs earn the same amount as a dividend equivalent, which is paid in cash when the RSU vests.
Meta started paying a dividend in February 2024, at $0.50 per share, and raised it to $0.525 in early 2025. The board declares each dividend, so future payments aren’t guaranteed. The most recent one was paid on September 28, 2026.
- Shares you own
- You get $0.525 per share each quarter in cash, like any other shareholder.
- Unvested RSUs
- Each time Meta pays a dividend, your unvested RSUs earn the same amount per unit as a dividend equivalent.
- When it’s paid
- You get the accumulated dividend equivalents in cash within 60 days after the RSU vests. They don’t earn interest in the meantime.
- If you leave
- You lose the dividend equivalents on any RSUs that haven’t vested.
- How it’s taxed
- Dividend equivalents are taxed as wages and show up on your paystub and W-2 with the vest they’re attached to. Dividends on shares you already own are regular dividends, and you’ll get a 1099-DIV for those.
At $2.10 per share a year and a stock price of about $660 at the end of 2025, the dividend yield is around 0.3%. That’s small compared with how much the stock price moves, so I wouldn’t let the dividend affect how much Meta you hold.
