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The Difference Between CEO and Employee Pay at 10 S&P 500 Companies

August 4, 2025

2 min Read

Written by Nicole Spector

Edited by Molly Sullivan

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Chief executive officers (CEOs) famously make the big bucks, particularly if they’re spearheading a large corporation. The highest-paid CEOS, like Brad Jacobs of QXO, Inc. and Peter Gassner of Veeva Systems Inc. make close to $200 million, respectively, per year. That’s quite extreme and not at all common, but the pay gap between many CEOs of S&P 500 companies and their employees is astonishing.

Research from the American Federation of Labor & Congress dug into the data and found that in 2024, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio for S&P 500 companies was 285-to-1. It’s highly worth noting that the median annual pay for U.S. employees in 2025 is $62,192 and that the median worker pay for all of these jobs is below — in some cases drastically — that number.