Dollar General General Counsel Pay More Than Doubles to $7.6 Million

Rhonda M. Taylor, Dollar General's Executive Vice President and General Counsel, collected $7.6 million in total compensation for the fiscal year ending January 30, 2026, more than double the $3.1 million she received the prior year, according to the company's proxy statement filed Tuesday.

The biggest driver was equity. Taylor received $5.6 million in stock awards, five times what she received in fiscal 2024. Her performance-based pay also surged, climbing from roughly $57,000 to just over $1 million in a single year.

Taylor joined Dollar General as an employment attorney in March 2000, making her one of the company's longest-tenured senior leaders at nearly 26 years with the Goodlettsville, Tennessee-based retailer. She became Senior Vice President and General Counsel in June 2013 and was elevated to Executive Vice President in March 2015. Before Dollar General, she specialized in labor law and employment litigation at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak and Stewart.

Her portfolio goes well beyond traditional legal work. Taylor oversees compliance, internal audit, risk management, public relations, government affairs, and corporate social responsibility — functions that touch virtually every part of a chain operating more than 20,000 stores.

The compensation jump lands as Dollar General manages a significant leadership handoff. CEO Todd Vasos, who returned to the role in October 2023 to help stabilize operations, is being succeeded by JJ Fleeman, a grocery executive who most recently led the U.S. division of Ahold Delhaize overseeing chains including Giant and Stop and Shop. The company reported a 4.3% same-store sales increase in its most recent quarter and projects fiscal 2026 net sales growth of 3.7% to 4.2%.

For the store associates and district managers tasked with hitting those numbers daily, the proxy is a useful document for a different reason. The structure of Taylor's package reveals what the company has decided to reward at the top: long-term equity tied to sustained performance, not short-term operational metrics. Dollar General has faced years of OSHA citations for conditions, including blocked exits and overstocked stockrooms, that employees and safety advocates have linked directly to understaffing. Whether the same performance frameworks that drove Taylor's stock award escalation eventually translate into investment at the store level is the question the proxy raises but does not answer.