This week at PayScale, we did a deep dive into the salaries of CEOs to understand how much CEOs make relative to typical workers. We also looked at how employees feel about the salaries their chief executives earn. Find out how much CEOs of the world’s most popular brands actually earn.
CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios of Popular U.S. Brands
In our report, we ranked CEO-to-worker pay ratios, which compare chief executives’ pay to the median compensation of their employees. Some of some of the most popular brands in the country (and the world) made the top of the list.
CVS has the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio in this year’s ranking. There were some surprises: Wells Fargo, for example, came in at No. 39, and had the highest ratio (130:1) of any banking company on the list, but came in lower than one might expect of a financial institution. For comparison, Bank of America has a ratio of 33:1.
Many CEOs Are Highly Paid (But Not in Cash)
If you’re a typical worker (read: not a CEO), the bulk of your compensation probably comes in cash. The big boss, however, might have a very different pay situation.
Through our research, we found that there are CEOs who accept as much as 100 percent cash compensation, and as little as 2 percent. To get a feel for these different ranges, here are a few different companies whose CEOs all take varying amounts of cash compensation:
Median Employee Salary Compared to Their CEO
When Fortune-500 CEOs take cash compensation, it’s typically a lot of cash compensation. To get a better idea of how much, it helps to look at CEO salaries in comparison to their employees. Here’s what we found in terms of the companies whose employees have the lowest median salaries.
Tell Us What You Think!
Do you think that CEOs are paid fairly? Do you think they earn too much? We want to hear from you! Comment below or join the discussion on Twitter!
CEOs are literally crowd-sourcing their wealth off their employees.