CEO Salary Survey: Consumer Products Industry (2024)

FAQs

How much does a CEO of a 500 million dollar company make? ›

By company size, base, bonus, and total cash compensation all rise as revenue does, with total average cash compensation coming in at $1,427,000 at companies with revenue above $500 million. By industry, CEOs in the consumer industry are paid the most, at $1,050,000 in average total cash compensation.

Where the estimated pay ratio across all respondents was reported to be 10-to1, the same group of people reported an ideal pay ratio of 4.6-to-1. And there you have it. The ideal CEO-to-employee pay ratio is not even 5-to-1. That is nearly 50 times lower than the actual practiced pay ratio of 202-to-1.

You can locate information about executive pay in: (1) the company's annual proxy statement; (2) the company's annual report on Form 10-K; and (3) registration statements filed by the company to register securities for sale to the public.

The Revenue Multiple (times revenue) Method

A venture that earns $1 million per year in revenue, for example, could have a multiple of 2 or 3 applied to it, resulting in a $2 or $3 million valuation. Another business might earn just $500,000 per year and earn a multiple of 0.5, yielding a valuation of $250,000.

On April 13, 2015, with reporters from The New York Times and NBC News in attendance, Price told Gravity Payments staff that he was raising the company's minimum salary to $70,000 and reducing his own compensation from $1.1 million to $70,000. The story quickly went viral.

Meet the $1 CEO Club. It might sound uncanny, but it is true: CEOs and former CEOs from major tech companies have or had salaries of just $1. Yes, Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Meg Whitman (HP), and Steve Jobs (Apple) earn or earned paychecks of just one dollar a month.

The CEO and now chairman of McDonald's was paid $19.2 million last year in salary, bonuses and stock, according to federal securities filings. That was an 8% increase over 2022. But it remained somewhat lower than in 2021, when Kempczinski was paid about $20 million.

The typical American would limit CEO pay to no more than six times that of the average worker. This figure is significantly below current pay multiples, which are approximately 210 times the average worker's pay, based on Equilar's compensation figures.

What is a good salary for a CEO? ›

Calculate the ratio: The ratio reflects how many times larger the CEO's compensation is in relation to the median employee compensation. The median employee income is numerically always one, meaning the ratio will be something like 1:300.

The median CEO total direct compensation across the entire survey population is $425,000. However, for companies with revenue under $50 million (Cousins Incorporated's size), the median total direct compensation is $280,000.

CEO pay continues to outpace the pay of working people across the country. In the past 10 years, typical CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased by more than $4 million, to an average of $17.7 million in 2023.

According to a 2024 report, CEOs of large public companies saw major increases in executive compensation and earned an average base salary of $2 million in 2024. Those at midsize firms averaged a base salary of about $1.15 million, and CEOs of smaller companies earned an average base salary of around $850,000.