CEOs Paid $20M to $50M

The $20M to $50M compensation bucket holds 18 CEOs in the SEC proxy-statement dataset. CEO compensation buckets organize executives by total comp range — useful for understanding the distribution of public-company executive pay across the U.S. equity market. Reading compensation buckets carefully: SEC disclosure includes base salary, stock awards (grant-date fair value), option awards (Black-Scholes value), non-equity incentive comp, pension changes, and other compensation. The total-comp number reported here uses the SEC Summary Compensation Table convention, which can differ meaningfully from the actually-realized comp in any given year.

For shareholders evaluating pay packages, the bucket position is informative but not decisive — pay-for-performance context (covered on each company's page) matters more than the absolute bucket. The same $30M package looks very different at a company with 50% three-year TSR than at one with -20%.