CEOs had smaller raises in 2022
Survey finds median compensation package of $14.8M, an increase of 0.9% from 2021
After ballooning for years, CEO pay growth is finally slowing.
The typical compensation package for chief executives who run S&P 500 companies rose just 0.9% last year, to a median of $14.8 million, according to data analyzed for The Associated Press by Equilar. That means half the CEOs in the survey made more and half made less. It was the smallest increase since 2015.
Still, that's unlikely to quell mounting criticism that CEO pay has become excessively high and the imbalance between company bosses and rank-and-file workers too wide. Discontent over that gap has helped fuel labor unrest, and even some institutional investors have pushed back against a few of the most eye-popping packages.
The smaller increase came after CEO pay soared 17% in 2021, when boards rewarded top executives handsomely for steering their companies through the pandemic-induced recession.
Many of the compensation packages were approved early in 2022 but even a small raise might seem lavish in retrospect against the backdrop of a year in which stock markets tanked to their worst performance since 2008, inflation erased wage gains, fears of a recession grew, and tech giants began laying off workers.
“I'm not surprised that after two record years in a row, pay hikes cooled somewhat,” said Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies. “What we shouldn't lose sight of is that CEO pay is still off the charts by historical measures.”
She said even a small hike last year was “outrageous.”
In contrast to recent years, CEO pay gains were lower than the 5.1% increase in wages and benefits netted by private-sector workers through 2022.
Still, worker pay failed to keep up with inflation, which was at 6.4% at the end of last year. And the pay disparity between CEOs and rank-and-file workers, which has been widening for years, narrowed only slightly.
The median pay for workers at companies included in the Associated Press survey was $77,178, up 1.3% from $76,160 the previous year. That means it would take that worker 186 years to make what a CEO making the median pay earned just last year. At the same group of companies in 2021, it would have taken 190 years.
Alphabet's CEO, Sundar Pichai, ranked No. 1 in the AP's pay survey this year with a package valued at nearly $226 million. The vast majority of his compensation came from a grant of restricted
stock, valued at $218 million, and which Google grants its CEO every three years.
Like many companies, Alphabet's equity portion of executive compensation is designed to reflect results over several years. Since Pichai started as CEO in 2015, Alphabet's stock has nearly quadrupled, and the company has become the third most valuable on Wall Street.
Nearly 130 CEOs in the AP's survey saw pay cuts last year. Among them was UPS CEO Carol Tomé, who received a total compensation package valued at nearly $19 million, most of it in stock awards. That's down 31% from $27.6 million in 2021. UPS said Tome's compensation was lower because she didn't exceed performance targets by as much in 2022 as she did in 2021.
Homebuilder Lennar, for example, capped the annual cash bonuses for its co-CEOs, Rick Beckwitt and Jonathan Jaffe, at $6 million each in response to complaints from investors about their $16.6 million bonuses in 2021.
Beckwitt and Jaffe saw their total compensation fall 11% and 12% in 2022, respectively, to $30.4 million and $30 million.
Higher up the pay scale, Apple CEO Tim Cook was No. 3 in the survey with a compensation package valued at $99.4 million, nearly identical to what Apple gave him in 2021. But Cook has requested a 40% pay cut for 2023 in response to the vote at last year's annual meeting, where just 64% of shareholders approved of Cook's pay package, compared to 94% the previous year.