CEO Pay Continues To Rise, Now Topping $20 Million In Average: Study

CEO compensation packages continue to rise, broadening the disparity between top executives and the employees they lead, according to a new report.

The study, conducted by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), found that the average pay of CEOs of S&P 500 companies rose 21 percent from 2024 to 2025.

The union study excluded Elon Musk's salary and compensation from the numbers, acknowledging that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO is an outlier. "In 2025, Elon Musk's $158 billion pay package at Tesla broke the CEO pay curve. It was 14 times higher than the total compensation of all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined," the study noted.

Still, even excluding Musk, the study found that average CEO salaries for S&P 500 companies hit $22.8 million in 2025, up from about $18.9 million the year before.

Some of the highest-paid CEOs excluding Musk included Welltower's Shankh Mitra at more than $821 million, Opendoor Technologies' Kaz Nejatian at more than $741 million, and Wayfair's Niraj Shah at more than $280 million.

The rising pay of CEO's is broadening the gap between workers and the executives who lead them. According to the study, the average pay ratio of non-Musk S&P 500 companies increased from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025.

The study found that the worker's share of U.S. income also had declined, suggesting a greater concentration of wealth at the top earning levels. For example, in 2000, workers accounted for 62.8 percent of U.S. income. According to the AFL-CIO, they now account for 54.1 percent of it.

"As we talk to ​our members, they're pissed off over what's happening to them, and they feel as though they should be more vocal in terms of calling attention to inequality," Fred Redmond, the AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer, told Reuters.

However, not all data suggests that workers are worse off than they were 25 years ago, or that there wages have not kept up with inflation. The Pew Research Center found that, overall, the buying power of Americans has increased since 1999, even factoring in the relatively high inflation post COVID-19.

"Without adjusting for inflation, median weekly wages more than doubled between the end of 1999 and the end of 2025, from $482 to $1,040. Factor in inflation, though, and real buying power over that span rose by anywhere from 11% to 22%, depending on which price index you use," the Pew Research Center stated.