Median CEO pay at the 982 U.S. companies with a fiscal-2025 proxy statement in our dataset was $9.39 million; the mean was $14.67 million. Across the full 1,024-company universe — adding foreign issuers and 10-K filers — the median is $9.43 million. Stock and option grants make up about three-quarters of the total.
Data as of June 10, 2026. Coverage: fiscal years ending in calendar 2025, disclosed in SEC filings made through June 10, 2026. Every figure below is computed from company filings; the ten largest packages were re-read line by line from the cited proxy statements.
Key findings
- Median $9.43M, mean $14.67M across 1,024 companies with a fiscal-2025 CEO pay disclosure. The mean runs 56% above the median because a few packages are very large.
- 723 of 1,024 CEOs (70.6%) earned less than the average. “Average CEO pay” describes a minority of CEOs.
- Seven packages crossed $100 million. Together they took $1.91 billion — 12.7% of all CEO pay in the dataset.
- Equity is the package. Stock and option awards account for 75.4% of aggregate CEO pay. The median CEO salary is $961,693 — about 10 cents of every pay dollar.
- Pay rose. Among 1,002 companies disclosing both years, the median package went from $8.79M (fiscal 2024) to $9.45M (fiscal 2025); 615 boards (61%) paid their CEO more than the year before.
- Median CEO pay
- $9.43M
- Mean CEO pay
- $14.67M
- Equity share
- 75.4%
- Median salary
- $961,693
Fiscal 2025, across 1,024 companies. $9.39M for the 982 proxy-statement filers.
Pulled up by seven $100M+ packages. Drop those and the mean falls to $12.89M.
Stock and option awards as a share of all CEO pay dollars in the dataset.
The cash base. Roughly 10% of the median CEO's total package.
Where the middle of the market sits
Half of the 1,024 CEOs in the dataset were paid less than $9.43 million for fiscal 2025, and half were paid more. The distribution is wide: a CEO at the 10th percentile earned $2.85 million; a CEO at the 99th percentile earned $95.47 million — 33 times as much.
Exhibit A
CEO pay by percentile, fiscal 2025
Total reported pay at each percentile across 1,024 companies. A 99th-percentile package ($95.47M) is 33 times the 10th percentile ($2.85M); even the 90th percentile is barely a quarter of the 99th.
Grouped into brackets, the center of gravity is the $10–25 million band — 367 companies, more than a third of the dataset. Just under half of all CEOs (484, or 47.3%) cleared $10 million.
Exhibit B
Where 1,024 CEO pay packages landed
Bar length is the number of companies in each bracket. The median package ($9.43M) sits in the navy $5M–$10M band; the seven $100M+ packages (gold) are what pull the mean to $14.67M — a band higher.
The seven $100M+ packages move every aggregate they touch. They hold 12.7% of the dataset’s entire $15.0 billion CEO pay pool. Exclude them and the mean drops from $14.67 million to $12.89 million, while the median barely moves ($9.43M to $9.38M) — which is why this article leads with the median.
The ten largest packages of fiscal 2025
Each total below was re-read from the company’s own SEC filing, not just our database. Two are option-heavy or all-stock moonshot grants (Opendoor, Rivian), two are IPO-year grants (ServiceTitan, Chime), one is a new-CEO package (Snowflake granted Sridhar Ramaswamy mostly options when he took over in February 2024), one is a single outsized stock award (Roivant — $157.6 million of Matthew Gline’s $163.3 million total), and the remaining four are large but conventional packages at Broadcom, Warner Bros. Discovery, Microsoft, and Citigroup.
| # | CEO | Company | Fiscal year end | Total pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kaz Nejatian |  Opendoor Technologies | Dec 2025 | $741,137,105 |
| 2 | Robert J. Scaringe |  Rivian Automotive | Dec 2025 | $402,639,080 |
| 3 | Hock E. Tan |  Broadcom | Nov 2025 | $205,278,006 |
| 4 | David M. Zaslav |  Warner Bros. Discovery | Dec 2025 | $165,009,366 |
| 5 | Matthew Gline |  Roivant Sciences | Mar 2025 | $163,293,744 |
| 6 | Ara Mahdessian |  ServiceTitan | Jan 2025 | $133,409,208 |
| 7 | Sridhar Ramaswamy |  Snowflake | Jan 2025 | $101,325,374 |
| 8 | Christopher Britt |  Chime Financial | Dec 2025 | $98,935,542 |
| 9 | Satya Nadella |  Microsoft | Jun 2025 | $96,496,790 |
| 10 | Jane Fraser |  Citigroup | Dec 2025 | $95,757,800 |
Kaz Nejatian’s $741 million at Opendoor is entirely stock awards — the salary and bonus columns in the filing read zero. Robert Scaringe’s $402.6 million at Rivian is mostly a $373.5 million option grant that only pays out if the stock climbs. Grant-date packages of this shape can end up worth far more or far less than the headline number; the proxy statement records what the board approved, not what the CEO will ultimately keep.
1,024 companies, one number each. We read the filings behind them every week.
What an average package is made of
Salary is a small slice. Summing every pay component across the 1,024 companies, stock and option awards account for 75.4 cents of each CEO pay dollar; salary accounts for 6.8 cents.
Exhibit C
What a CEO pay dollar is made of
Equity · 75.4%
- Stock awards
- 64.0%
- Option awards
- 11.4%
- Cash incentive plans
- 10.9%
- Salary
- 6.8%
- All other compensation
- 4.1%
- Discretionary bonus
- 2.0%
- Pension & deferred-pay interest
- 0.8%
Each component’s share of the $15.0 billion paid to all 1,024 CEOs in fiscal 2025. Navy segments are equity (stock and option awards); together they are 75.4 cents of every dollar. Cash incentive plans are formula-based annual bonuses; all other compensation covers perks, security, and retirement matches.
The picture holds company by company, not just in aggregate: for the median CEO, equity awards are 69.3% of the package and salary is 9.9%. The median salary itself is $961,693 — just under one million dollars, at companies where the median total package is $9.43 million. When boards move CEO pay, they move the equity grant, not the paycheck.
Fiscal 2025 versus fiscal 2024
To compare years fairly we restrict to the same-company cohort: the 1,002 companies with a qualifying CEO pay row in both fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025. Within that cohort, the median package rose from $8.79 million to $9.45 million. The median company raised CEO pay 6.7%; 615 companies (61%) paid more, 382 paid less.
Narrowing further to the 882 companies where the same person held the job in both years, the median raise was 7.9%, and 566 of those CEOs (64%) got one. New-CEO transitions, which often mix partial years with sign-on grants, do not explain the increase — continuing CEOs got slightly larger raises than the cohort overall.
What the average hides
Thirty-one companies reported a CEO total under $1 million, and they are not all what they look like. Ares Capital reported $0 for its CEO because the firm is externally managed: the manager pays him, not the company shareholders own. Symbotic reported $0 for founder-CEO Richard Cohen. A $0 row usually means the pay is flowing through a channel the summary table doesn’t capture — existing ownership stakes, a management company, or an earlier mega-grant still vesting. The most famous $0 CEO is not in this dataset at all: Teslahad not filed a fiscal-2025 pay disclosure as of June 10, 2026. Its latest proxy statement, filed in September 2025, covers fiscal 2024 — and reports a $0 total for Elon Musk there, as in every fiscal year from 2020 through 2024. His last nonzero entry was $23,760 of unaccepted salary in 2019.
Size is the other axis the headline number flattens. Pay scales with company size, and this dataset spans mega-caps to small-caps; our CEO pay by company size tool breaks the same disclosure data into market-cap brackets, and Time to CEO Payconverts any company’s number into working time. We do not publish CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio statistics from this dataset — only 54 companies have a usable fiscal-2025 ratio on file so far, too few to be honest about. For how those ratios work, read CEO Pay Ratios Explained.
And the grant-date totals here measure what boards decided, not what performance delivered. Whether the pay tracked shareholder returns is a separate test — we run it in Are CEOs Paid for Performance?.
Methodology
Every number comes from compensation disclosures companies file with the SEC — for most U.S. companies, the annual proxy statement they send shareholders before the annual meeting (see What Is Proxy Season?). The filing’s pay disclosure is a standardized grid called the summary compensation table: one row per senior officer, with columns for salary, bonus, the grant-date value of stock and option awards, incentive payouts, pension changes, and everything else. “Total pay” in this article is that table’s total column — the board’s decision at grant time, valued under accounting rules, not cash received and not shares eventually kept.
Universe.1,024 companies in the rentseek.ing dataset with a qualifying fiscal-2025 CEO pay disclosure — one CEO row per company, the chief executive officer or other principal executive. 982 trace to a definitive proxy statement; the rest are foreign issuers and companies that disclose pay in annual-report filings. This is not all U.S. public companies: coverage skews to larger issuers we have ingested, and companies whose fiscal-2025 disclosure has not been filed yet (Tesla, for example) are not counted.
Fiscal years.“Fiscal 2025” means the company’s fiscal year ended in calendar 2025. Microsoft’s year ended June 2025; Roivant’s ended March 2025 (its proxy labels that year “Fiscal 2024”); Snowflake’s and ServiceTitan’s ended January 2025.
Verification. The ten largest totals were re-read from the cited filings. That check removed two companies from the dataset entirely — Netskope and Tesla, where our stored values matched no row in the cited filings (Tesla’s latest proxy covers fiscal 2024, so it has no qualifying fiscal-2025 disclosure yet) — and removed Blackstone from the top-ten table (its highest-paid disclosed executive for the year is the operating chief, not the CEO). Snowflake’s filing prints a total one dollar below the sum of its own components; we show the printed total. Genuine $0 totals (Ares Capital, Symbotic) stay in.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average CEO pay in America in 2026?
Across 982 U.S. companies that filed a fiscal-2025 proxy statement in the rentseek.ing dataset, median CEO total compensation was $9.39 million and the mean was $14.67 million. The full 1,024-company universe, which adds foreign issuers and annual-report filers, shows nearly identical numbers: a $9.43 million median.
Why is mean CEO pay so much higher than the median?
A few very large packages pull the mean up. Seven fiscal-2025 packages crossed $100 million and together took 12.7% of the dataset's $15.0 billion CEO pay pool. As a result, 723 of 1,024 CEOs — 70.6% — earned less than the $14.67 million average. The median is the more honest benchmark.
How much of CEO pay is salary versus stock?
Salary is about 7% of all CEO pay dollars; stock and option awards are about 75%. For the median CEO in fiscal 2025, salary was $961,693 — roughly 10% of the package — while equity grants made up 69%. Boards adjust CEO pay by resizing the annual equity grant, not the paycheck.
Did CEO pay go up in fiscal 2025?
Yes. Among the 1,002 companies disclosing comparable data for both years, the median CEO package rose from $8.79 million in fiscal 2024 to $9.45 million in fiscal 2025, and 61% of boards paid more. Where the same person held the job in both years, the median raise was 7.9%.
Who was the highest-paid CEO of fiscal 2025?
By reported total pay in the company's proxy statement, Opendoor's Kaz Nejatian, at $741,137,105 — entirely stock awards, with zero salary and zero bonus. Rivian's Robert Scaringe was second at $402.6 million, mostly a $373.5 million option grant that only pays out if the stock climbs.
Sources & Methodology
- Data: SEC EDGAR compensation disclosures (definitive proxy statements, plus 20-F and 10-K filings) for 1,024 companies, fiscal years ending in calendar 2025, extracted via our deterministic pipeline and queried from the rentseek.ing analytics warehouse on June 10, 2026.
- Statistics: Medians, means, percentiles, and pay-mix shares computed across one CEO row per company. Year-over-year figures use the 1,002-company cohort present in both fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025.
- Verification: All ten table rows re-checked against the cited SEC filings (accession numbers preserved in the research snapshot in our repository). Two extraction errors found and excluded; exclusions are documented above.
- Limitations: Grant-date totals measure board decisions, not realized outcomes. Coverage skews to larger companies. Fiscal years ending late in 2025 may still gain restated rows as amended filings arrive.
The median CEO made $9.43 million. The interesting part is who didn’t.
Every week we dig into the proxy filings most analysts skip — mega-grants, $0 salaries, and the boards that pay for results the stock never delivered. One email, Fridays.