After two uncharacteristic years of decline in 2022 and 2023, CEO pay surged in 2024 and remained enormous compared with the pay of other workers, according to a new data tool on CEO pay provided by the Economic Policy Institute. Average realized CEO compensation—including stock awards and options—at the top 350 U.S. firms was $22.98 million in 2024, a 5.9% increase from 2023.
From 1978–2024, top CEO compensation skyrocketed 1,094%, compared with a 26% increase in a typical worker’s compensation. In 2024, CEOs were paid 281 times as much as a typical worker—in contrast to 1965, when they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker.
CEO pay is excessive even relative to other extraordinarily privileged actors in the economy, with CEOs making 7.5 times as much as the top 0.1% of workers in 2023 (the last year available). This suggests that CEOs are not paid extraordinary amounts because of any special skills or greater productivity, but because they have extraordinary leverage over corporate boards that set their pay. If CEOs were paid less, there would be no loss of productivity or output in the economy.
Stratospheric CEO pay levels have attracted the attention of policymakers looking to rein them in, like the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act introduced last week by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Rashida Tlaib. Previous EPI work has outlined several policy solutions that could limit CEOs’ ability to attain increasingly higher pay, including changes to tax policy as well as reforms to antitrust enforcement, labor policy, and corporate governance rules that could provide countervailing power against CEOs’ ability to effectively set their own pay levels.
“CEOs do not work 281 times harder than the typical worker—they just have the power to set their own pay, and the dysfunctional labor market for corporate executives doesn’t provide any effective discipline against this. Policies that limit CEOs’ ability to extract excessive compensation are one set of reforms needed to end the winner-take-all aspect of economic life in the U.S.,” said Josh Bivens, EPI chief economist.