CEO pay tops $19M annually, study finds

The top executives of America’s biggest companies saw their average annual pay surge to $18.9 million in 2017, according to a report released Thursday, fueling concerns about the gulf between the nation’s richest and everyone else.

The dramatic 18 percent jump in chief executive pay came as wages for American workers remained essentially flat, pushing the gap between executive compensation and employee pay to its highest point in about a decade.

The rise in executive pay shown in the report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, is driven largely by the big increases in the stock market over the past year. Much of CEO compensation is made up of stock grants or options, which can skyrocket when companies’ stock performs well.

From 2009 to 2017, average pay for the nation’s CEOs jumped by $7.8 million, or 72 percent, according to the report. Over that period, the average wages and benefits for a typical American worker rose from $53,400 to $54,600, or about 2 percent, the report said.

“It speaks to the degree the economic recovery is unbalanced,” said Larry Mishel, an economist who co-authored the report.

The EPI’s $18.9 million figure is an average of CEO compensation among the 350 largest U.S. companies and includes the value that CEOs have realized from stock options, as well as salary, bonus, restricted stock grant awards and other long-term payouts, the report said.

As a result, that figure appears different from other analyses about CEO pay. A CEO pay report done by the firm Equilar for the Associated Press, for example, found a median pay increase of 8.5 percent in 2017, to $11.7 million.

The finding comes as experts have pointed to skyrocketing wealth inequality as a growing problem in the nation, with the richest Americans pocketing a disproportionate share of economic growth.

The richest 5 percent of Americans have captured 74 percent of the wealth created in the country from 1983 to 2010, according to another EPI report.