CEO Pay Ratio Trends 2022-2024 — What SEC Proxy Filings Show

Headline finding: median ratio held steady, but tails widened

Across the three years, the cross-company median pay ratio sat in a narrow band around the mid-100s — strikingly stable for an indicator that policy debates often treat as volatile. The story is in the tails: the 90th-percentile ratio (the most-extreme decile of filers) drifted upward in 2023 and 2024 relative to 2022. The drift is driven almost entirely by a handful of large-cap consumer-facing employers whose median-worker pay is anchored by part-time hourly workforces while their CEO total-compensation packages are dominated by stock awards that vested as equity markets recovered after the 2022 drawdown.

Industry composition matters more than industry pay norms

It is tempting to read industry-level pay-ratio differences as a statement about how generously the industry pays its executives. The data does not support that reading. The dominant industry signal is workforce composition: industries with high part-time, hourly, or geographically-distributed workforces (retail, hospitality, food services) consistently report the highest ratios — but their CEO total compensation is, on average, lower than the cross-industry median. Conversely, technology and pharmaceutical industries report lower ratios despite paying CEOs more than the cross-industry median, because their median employee is full-time, salaried, and in many cases earns six figures.

The practical implication is that the headline ratio is an artifact of who counts as a "median employee" — not a clean signal about executive generosity. Investors and journalists using these figures for cross-firm comparisons should pair the ratio with the absolute median-worker compensation figure (also disclosed in the proxy) before drawing inferences.

Granted vs realized pay creates apparent ratio volatility

The disclosed ratio uses the Summary Compensation Table (SCT) figure for CEO total compensation, which is granted pay at grant-date fair value. When equity markets move sharply between the grant date and the vesting date, realized pay can diverge from granted pay by 5-10x. Some filers also include a Pay Versus Performance (PvP) table that surfaces realized pay; in our 2024 sample, the PvP-realized ratio differs from the SCT-granted ratio by more than 50% for roughly one in five companies. We surface both figures on the company detail page so readers can see which framing applies to a given company.

Concentration of the largest ratios

Of the companies in the 99th-percentile of disclosed ratios across all three years, more than half are in two SIC2 groups: 58 (Eating and Drinking Places) and 56 (Apparel and Accessory Stores). This concentration is consistent with workforce-composition explanation: both sectors are dominated by hourly part-time staff. None of these companies' CEO total compensation exceeded the cross-industry 99th percentile — confirming that the pay ratio is more sensitive to denominator (median worker pay) than to numerator (CEO pay).

Pay-component composition is the under-discussed driver

Across the dataset, stock awards account for the largest single share of CEO total compensation — typically 55-70% of the headline figure. Annual cash bonuses contribute roughly 15-20%; base salary 5-10%; option awards (where used) 0-15%; and the residual is "all other compensation" (perks, benefits, contractual items). The mix is highly industry-specific: technology firms lean heavily on stock awards (often 80%+), while utilities and regulated banks lean toward larger cash-incentive components. When equity markets move, the granted-pay numerator moves with them, and the year-over-year ratio drift in a single company often reflects market beta more than any board-level compensation decision.

Composition effects swamp absolute-pay signals

The persistent finding throughout this analysis is that workforce composition exerts greater leverage on the headline pay ratio than executive-compensation generosity. A grocery-chain CEO earning $4 million annually surfaces a ratio above 200 because the chain's median worker — typically a part-time cashier — earns $19,000. A semiconductor-firm CEO earning $25 million surfaces a ratio of 67 because the firm's median worker — a salaried engineer — earns $373,000. The ratio appears wildly different despite the absolute CEO compensation being six-times larger in the semiconductor case. Investors, journalists, and policymakers who treat the disclosed ratio as a normalized comparability index must overlay it with sector-specific workforce-composition context to derive meaningful inferences.

Pay Versus Performance disclosures are still uneven

The SEC's 2022 Pay Versus Performance rule requires companies to disclose realized executive pay alongside granted pay, plus an explicit comparison to total shareholder return (TSR) and a financial performance measure. Three years in, disclosure quality varies widely. Some filers provide a full table with five years of comparable data and named performance metrics; others provide the minimum required and bury reconciliations in footnotes. For investor-facing analysis, we recommend reading the PvP section alongside the Summary Compensation Table rather than treating either in isolation.