A Look at CEO Pay in 2025

The typical CEO compensation package rose nearly 6% in 2025 to $17.7 million, as company boards rewarded their top executives for bigger profits and higher stock prices, and gave them incentives to stick around and make money for shareholders. The median employee at companies in the S&P 500 earned $89,744, reflecting a 4.7% increase year over year. While that gain outpaced the rate of inflation in 2025, many workers still had to cut corners to make ends meet and run up credit card debt. The AP's CEO compensation survey, which uses data analyzed for the AP by Equilar, included pay data for 337 executives at S&P 500 companies who served at least two full consecutive fiscal years at their companies, which filed proxy statements between Jan. 1 and April 30. Highlights:

• Pay gap: At half the companies in AP's survey, it would take a worker at the middle of the company's pay scale 200 years to make what the CEO did in one, up from 192 years in last year's survey. The pay ratio tends to be highest at companies in industries where wages are typically low. At Coca-Cola, its CEO earned nearly 1,739 times the median pay of $17,947 for its workers.
• CEO pay: While many think of a pay package as consisting of salary, bonus, and perks, those components make up only a small percentage of pay for the modern CEO. Many companies have heeded calls from shareholders to tie CEO compensation more closely to performance. As a result, a large proportion of pay packages consist of stock awards, which the CEO often can't cash in for years, if at all, unless the company meets certain targets.
• Big rewards, lofty goals: Elon Musk's pay package is so extraordinary that even the pope weighed in. The Tesla CEO received compensation valued at $132.3 billion, all in the form of stock awards. To get the shares, Musk must meet ambitious targets over the next 10 years. Shankh Mitra of Welltower received the second-largest compensation package in the survey at $821.1 million, the bulk of it in stock awards. Mitra can only receive the full compensation, beyond a $110,000 annual salary, after a 10-year period.

• Big payouts for bankers: CEOs of three of the nation's biggest banks got rewarded for yearslong efforts to retool their companies and revive stagnant stock prices. Goldman Sachs' David Solomon's pay package totaled almost $119 million—including stock valued at $80 million he can receive after five years. Jane Fraser of Citigroup received a pay package valued at $95.8 million—tops among the 27 women CEOs in the survey and the highest for a woman CEO in the survey's history. Wells Fargo gave CEO Charles Scharf a pay package worth $94.5 million after his yearslong effort to lead the bank back from scandal.
• Other notables: In his last year as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett received $389,488—down 4% from the year prior. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's compensation was valued at $25.1 million and almost all of it involved costs for the company to provide security for him and his family, as well as the use of corporate aircraft. Jensen Huang of Nvidia got a pay package valued at $36.3 million.