qubit processors. Recent experimental work reported an additional feature in the vacuum Rabi splitting of peaks in the resonator transmission spectrum, which has remained unexplained until now. In this work, we show that this feature originates from transitions between excited states in the Jaynes-Cummings ladder, which are not included in commonly used input-output models for spin circuit QED. We present an input-output framework that does include these effects and is based on a numerical solution of a Lindblad master equation in the stationary limit. In new experiments, we first reproduce previous observations and then reveal both excited-state transitions and multi-photon transitions by increasing the probe power and using two-tone spectroscopy. This ability to probe the Jaynes-Cummings ladder in spin circuit QED is an important new step in the development of the platform. In future work, our input-output framework can be straightforwardly extended to accurately describe resonator-mediated interactions between two remote spins.