CEO Total Compensation and Pay Ratio Trends, FY 2024

The single number "total compensation" on the proxy statement compresses several very different pay components (salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive pay, pension changes) into one headline. This page explains what PlainCEOPay's current dataset can show about that headline figure and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio for fiscal year 2024 - and is transparent about what it cannot show yet, since our pipeline does not currently ingest the individual Summary Compensation Table line items needed for a true equity-vs-cash breakdown.

Research Question

For FY 2024 filers, what does PlainCEOPay's dataset show about CEO total compensation and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio, and what would a true equity-vs-cash breakdown require that we don't currently have?

Methodology

PlainCEOPay's database currently ingests, per FY 2024 DEF 14A filing: CEO total compensation (the Summary Compensation Table headline figure) and the disclosed CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio. It does not currently ingest the individual SCT line items (base salary, annual bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive plan compensation, pension-value change, all other compensation) that a genuine equity-vs-cash split would require. A prior version of this page presented industry- and component-level percentages that this dataset cannot actually support; we have removed those figures rather than let them stand uncorrected. Full current field coverage is documented on our methodology page.

What we can show: total compensation and pay ratio by industry

The chart below is computed live from PlainCEOPay's industry_benchmarks table: the median CEO total compensation by SIC2 industry group for FY 2024, restricted to industry groups with at least 5 filers (a single-company "median" isn't a meaningful industry signal). This is real, but it is a total-compensation view, not an equity-vs-cash split.

Security & Commodity Brokers (SIC 62)$13.1MCommunications (SIC 48)$10.7MMiscellaneous Retail (SIC 59)$9.3MBusiness Services (SIC 73)$8.6MMeasuring Instruments (SIC 38)$8.3MFood & Beverages (SIC 20)$8.1MIndustrial Machinery & Equipment (SIC 35)$7.8MChemicals & Pharmaceuticals (SIC 28)$7.3M

Source:

What a true equity-vs-cash breakdown would require

A rigorous equity-vs-cash analysis needs, at minimum, the individual Summary Compensation Table line items for each filer: base salary, annual bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive plan compensation, pension-value change, and all other compensation. It is well known in compensation-governance literature that large-cap US CEO pay is generally weighted toward equity rather than cash salary, and that industry norms (technology skewing more equity-heavy, regulated industries like banking and utilities skewing more cash-heavy) drive much of the cross-company variation, this is a widely reported pattern in SEC-filing research generally, not a finding this page can currently reproduce from PlainCEOPay's own data. We are not going to publish specific percentages, dollar splits, tenure-based equity premiums, or PSU-vs-RSU conditioning rates attributed to "our sample" when our pipeline does not yet ingest the fields those claims would require. When component-level ingestion ships, this page will be rebuilt around real per-company figures rather than removed claims.

Granted-vs-realized pay: also not yet computable here

The Pay Versus Performance (PvP) disclosure rule introduced in 2022 requires filers to also report realized pay (grant-date equity revalued at vesting-date prices), which can diverge substantially from the granted-pay figure in the Summary Compensation Table, especially for equity-heavy packages in volatile-stock industries. PlainCEOPay does not currently ingest PvP-table data, so we cannot show a granted-vs-realized comparison here either. This is a documented roadmap item, not a silent gap, tracked on our methodology page.

What this page cannot tell us (yet)

This page does not show an equity-vs-cash split, industry-level pay-component percentages, tenure-based equity premiums, PSU-vs-RSU conditioning rates, or granted-vs-realized pay divergence, because PlainCEOPay's pipeline does not currently ingest the Summary Compensation Table line items, PvP-table figures, or CEO-tenure data those analyses would require. The industry chart above shows total compensation only. We would rather state this limitation plainly than publish numbers we cannot support.

Sources

Every figure on PlainCEOPay is rendered directly from SEC EDGAR executive compensation filings, no number is typed in by an editor. Total compensation and pay-ratio figures on this page draw directly from SEC EDGAR filings ingested by PlainCEOPay; no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.