New York – More companies are listening to investors’ criticism that they overpay chief executives, but that doesn’t mean businesses have fixed the problem.
CEO pay continued to climb in 2005, although not nearly as rapidly as in recent years, new surveys show. The median pay to CEOs rose 11.3 percent last year, according to a survey of more than 550 companies by the Corporate Library, a governance firm.
For CEOs at the largest firms, however, pay rose 3.7 percent to a median of $5.2 million.
But the size of the typical CEO’s raise varied greatly by which companies were counted, and overall figures obscure wide variations in pay.
A closer look at individual companies shows that more than one in four granted their CEOs raises of at least 25 percent, according to a survey of nearly 200 large firms by compensation analyst Equilar Inc.
The newest raises for top executives mean the pay of the average CEO at a Standard & Poor’s 500 firm is now 430 times that of the average U.S. worker – more than 10 times what it was in 1980, according to the AFL-CIO.
Once again, the largest payouts went to CEOs cashing in huge numbers of stock options.
