CEO-To-Worker Pay ‘Has Skyrocketed Over The Last Six Decades’ - In 2025, CEOs ‘Were Paid 325 Times As Much As A Typical Worker In Contrast To 1965, When They Were Paid 21 Times As Much As A Typical Worker’
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - CEOs of major U.S. companies were paid 21 times as much as the typical Worker in 1965, using the realized measure of CEO compensation, which captures what CEOs took home in pay after any stock-based compensation were sold, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
This ratio grew to 31-to-1 in 1978 and 60-to-1 by 1989.
It surged in the 1990s, hitting 380-to-1 in 2000 at the end of the 1990s recovery and at the height of the stock market bubble.
The fall in the stock market after 2000 reduced CEO stock-related pay, such as realized stock options, and caused CEO compensation to tumble in 2002 before beginning to rise again in 2003.
Realized CEO compensation recovered to a level of 329 times Worker pay by 2007, still below its 2000 level.
The financial crisis of 2008 and accompanying stock market decline reduced CEO compensation between 2007 and 2009, and the CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio fell in tandem.
Over the 2009-to-2021 period, another surge in realized CEO compensation brought the ratio to 408-to-1, a historic high.
The ratio experienced significant declines between 2021 and 2023, as CEO pay fell.
In 2025, the CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio surged ahead to 325-to-1, far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and the early 1990s.
The extraordinarily high level of the CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio over the long term reflects the strikingly different trajectory of CEO pay compared with typical worker pay over the last nearly five decades.
On the one hand, compensation of a typical Worker has grown slowly since the late 1970s: Just 28% over the 47 years from 1978 to 2025, despite a corresponding growth of net economy-wide productivity of 86% (EPI 2026).
By contrast, realized CEO compensation grew a staggering 1,316% from 1978 to 2025 (excluding 1979, since there are no data for that year), obviously far exceeding the growth in productivity (or really any other economic metric) over that period.
To Directly Access This Labor News Story, Go To: CEO Pay | Economic Policy Institute
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