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.

Whole number. A ratio of 344 means the CEO earns 344× the median employee.

Distribution snapshot

10th pct
9:1
25th pct
34:1
Median
81:1
75th pct
174:1
90th pct
354:1

3,916 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 3,916 U.S. issuers.

Every figure on PlainCEOPay is rendered directly from SEC EDGAR executive compensation filings, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on SEC EDGAR executive compensation data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.