Tool
CEO Pay Ratio Percentile Lookup
Free tool to see where any company's CEO-to-worker pay ratio ranks among 2,000+ U.S. public companies. Data from SEC EDGAR proxy filings.
Distribution snapshot
- 10th pct
- 539:1
- 25th pct
- 607:1
- Median
- 815:1
- 75th pct
- 1144:1
- 90th pct
- 1545:1
100 U.S. public companies ranked by SEC-reported pay ratio. Companies with the most extreme ratios (1,000:1+) are typically retail (large part-time workforce → low median worker pay) or tech with significant CEO stock awards.
Context for ratio bands
- Below 50:1 — Small/mid-cap, professional services, or companies with mostly salaried full-time U.S. workforce.
- 50–150:1 — Typical mid-cap range. Most S&P 500 industrials cluster here.
- 150–500:1 — Large-cap norm. Tech CEOs with heavy stock awards are common.
- 500–1,500:1 — Retail and food service giants where the median worker is part-time hourly.
- 1,500:1+ — Outlier. Often driven by one-time mega-grants or workforce composition (gig-platform companies).
Why workforce composition matters
The pay ratio is sensitive to who counts as "median employee." A retailer with 200,000 part-time hourly workers will have a much lower median than a software firm with 5,000 full-time engineers. SEC permits companies to use Consistently Applied Compensation Measure (CACM) and demographic sampling — methodology details appear in proxy footnotes. Read more about how the ratio is calculated.
Source & methodology
Pay ratio data from SEC EDGAR DEF 14A proxy filings. Required disclosure under Dodd-Frank Section 953(b), effective for fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 2017. Each company self-reports the ratio in its annual proxy statement. PlainCEOPay aggregates these across 100 U.S. issuers.