Skip to main content
CEOPayWatch

Editorial Policy

Last updated: June 2026

This page explains who is behind CEOPayWatch, how our pages are produced, and the standards every page on ceopaywatch.com is held to. We publish it so readers, journalists, and search engines can judge our work by a clear, stated process rather than guesswork.

Who runs CEOPayWatch

CEOPayWatch is an independent publication built and maintained by the CEOPay Team. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. We do not accept paid placements, sponsored rankings, or fees to add, alter, or remove an entry. Our editorial judgment is not for sale.

How our content is produced

CEOPayWatch covers U.S. executive compensation at public companies. Our pages are assembled programmatically from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings: we fetch the primary records, process them with documented, repeatable methods, and render them as pages a non-specialist can read. 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.

We are transparent that this is a data-publishing operation, not a wire service of on-the-ground reporters. Where we add narrative, that narrative describes and interprets the underlying public data — it never invents facts the data does not contain. Automated assembly is reviewed against the source, and the methodology behind any score or ranking is documented and linkable.

Editorial standards

  • Primary source only. Every figure traces back to SEC EDGAR XBRL filings, cited and linkable on the page where it appears.
  • No invented numbers. If a value is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on ceopaywatch.com. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
  • Documented methodology. Rankings, grades, and composite scores are editorial calculations derived from public data using stated, repeatable formulas — not certifications or endorsements.
  • Dated and refreshed. 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. When a reader or the source identifies an error, we fix it — see our Corrections Policy.

Verification and fact-checking

Because our numbers come straight from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings, our verification work is about faithful processing rather than re-reporting. The detail of how we check figures before publication is described in our Fact-Checking Policy.

Ownership and funding transparency

CEOPayWatch is part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. The site is free to read and carries no display advertising. We do not sell personal data. Where an outbound link is an affiliate link, it is disclosed and never changes our editorial judgment.

Contact

Questions about how a page was produced, or about these standards? hello@ceopaywatch.com. See also our About page and our Corrections Policy.