About CEOPayWatch
Who’s the most overpaid CEO in America?
What we do
CEOPayWatch ranks executive pay against company size, revenue, and employee wages using proxy statements filed with the SEC.
We focus on U.S. executive compensation at public companies. Every page on ceopaywatch.com is built from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings, cited and linkable so readers can trace any number back to its source.
Who runs this
CEOPayWatch is built and maintained by the CEOPay Team. We're a small group working on making public U.S. executive compensation at public companies data easier for non-specialists to read. If you have a correction, a data tip, or a question about how a number was derived, the contact email below reaches us directly.
Who this is for
CEOPayWatch is built for investors, corporate-governance researchers, labor reporters, and the general public.
Why this exists
Public data on U.S. executive compensation at public companies is technically free, but practically locked behind file formats, acronyms, and paywalled dashboards. CEOPayWatchexists to close that gap: take the raw federal and public-sector data, and turn it into pages a normal person can read in thirty seconds.
How we work
- Primary source only. We pull from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings and cite the exact dataset and version on every page.
- No invented numbers. If a figure is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on ceopaywatch.com. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
- Methodology, in plain English. We parse annual proxy statements (DEF 14A) for every S&P 1500 company, extract Summary Compensation Table totals for the top five named executives, and compare those totals to company revenue, market cap, three-year total shareholder return, say-on-pay vote results, and median-employee pay under the SEC pay-ratio rule. The CEOPay pay-for-performance composite weights three-year TSR alignment (40%), revenue growth versus compensation growth (30%), say-on-pay approval (20%), and CEO-to-worker pay ratio versus peers (10%) into a 0-100 grade.
- Refreshed on a schedule. Refreshed quarterly, with most proxy filings arriving during the March-to-May annual-meeting window. Calendar-year-end companies typically file proxies in March; June- and December-end companies cluster outside that window.
- Corrections welcome. Readers flag issues all the time. When the source fixes a record, CEOPayWatch follows.
Known limitations
Total Compensation on proxies includes grant-date fair value of equity awards, not realized dollars — reported pay and actual paychecks can diverge materially when stock prices move. Companies outside the S&P 1500 are not covered. CEO compensation comparisons require peer-group context; compensation committees explicitly select peer groups when setting CEO pay, and cross-industry comparisons can mislead without controlling for that.
Why combine pay, performance, and shareholder votes
Public-company CEO pay data has been disclosed in detailed proxy statements for over twenty years. The Summary Compensation Table, the CD&A (Compensation Discussion and Analysis), the say-on-pay vote, and the more recent pay-versus-performance disclosure together produce one of the most comprehensive public-records systems for any U.S. corporate-governance topic.
Reading that data well requires combining multiple disclosures. Total CEO compensation in isolation tells you what was paid; combining it with three-year total shareholder return tells you whether the pay aligned with results; combining both with the say-on-pay vote tells you what large institutional shareholders concluded; and combining all three with the CEO-to-worker pay ratio gives you the internal-equity dimension. CEOPay assembles all four on a single per-company page so the comparison can be made without flipping between SEC filings.
The rubric weights TSR alignment heaviest (40%) because shareholder return is the most defensible single measure of company performance over a three-to-five-year window. Say-on-pay (20%) carries the institutional-investor verdict. Revenue-vs-compensation growth (30%) catches packages that grew faster than the underlying business. Pay ratio (10%) is included for governance signaling, not because it directly measures performance.
What this data can and cannot tell you
The grant-date-fair-value convention matters. Stock and option awards in the SEC Summary Compensation Table are valued at grant date using Black-Scholes (for options) or fair-market-value (for stock), then expensed over the vesting period. Actually-realized compensation — what the CEO ended up taking home when shares vested or options were exercised — can be substantially higher or lower depending on stock-price movement. The 2022 SEC Pay-Versus-Performance rule requires companies to disclose a "compensation actually paid" figure that approximates realized comp; we surface that where available.
Peer-group context is critical and underdisclosed in summary form. Compensation committees explicitly choose peer groups for benchmarking CEO pay, and those peer groups vary across companies even within the same industry. A $20M package at a company benchmarking against mega-cap technology firms reads differently than the same package at a company benchmarking against industrial peers. The full proxy statement discloses the peer group; the headline pay number does not.
Pay packages also vary by role tenure and transition events. First-year CEO packages often include large one-time equity grants meant to replace forfeited equity from a prior employer. Departing CEO packages may include severance and acceleration-of-vesting components. The per-year compensation history on each company page shows these patterns; the single most-recent-year number does not.
How to read a company page
Each /company/[slug] page on CEOPay starts with the pay-for-performance grade and the headline CEO compensation, then expands into the underlying breakdown. The narrative section translates the numbers into plain English, branched on the specific profile of the company (extreme-pay mega-caps vs. high-pay large-caps vs. mid-pay public companies, alongside performance and say-on-pay results).
Below the narrative, we show the per-component CEO comp breakdown (salary, stock, options, incentive, other), the multi-year compensation history, the named-executive-officer table covering the top five officers, and the underlying pay-for-performance factor scores that drive the headline grade. Each chart links to the underlying SEC EDGAR filing for verification.
For shareholders evaluating pay packages across multiple companies, the most useful comparison entry points are the industry-specific pages (e.g., /industry/technology, /industry/financials), which let you compare CEOs within the same compensation-committee peer-group context. The ranking pages (highest-paid, worst pay ratio, best pay-for-performance) are useful as starting points but cross-industry comparisons require care.
Independence
CEOPayWatch is an independent publication. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. Hosting is paid for by advertising — see our Privacy Policy for details — and we do not take paid placements, sponsored rankings, or "remove-my-entry" fees.
History
CEOPayWatch launched in 2025 as part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. It has been maintained and updated continuously since.
Contact
Tips, corrections, data-partnership questions, and press inquiries: hello@ceopaywatch.com. More options on our contact page.