Ten years ago, just months after announcing his presidential campaign, Donald Trump called sky-high CEO pay “disgraceful,” telling CBS’s Face the Nation in 2015: “You see these guys making enormous amounts of money, and it’s a total and complete joke.”
Since then, average CEO pay—and the gap between it and median worker pay—has grown even more. And as president, Trump’s policies are making that inequality even worse.
The average CEO-to-worker-pay ratio for S&P 500 Index companies in 2024 was 285 to 1, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Executive Paywatch report—an increase from 268 to 1 in 2023.
In 2024, as Americans fretted about the rising costs of eggs and housing, and the way they felt the country’s economy was leaving them behind, the average CEO of an S&P 500 company saw an average pay increase of $1.24 million. In 2024, the CEOs at those companies received $18.9 million in total compensation, up 7% from the year prior.
The tax cuts in Trump’s “big beautiful bill” are set to increase CEO take-home pay even more. Each CEO is set to get about $500,000 back from those tax cuts; all together, the CEOs of the publicly traded companies in the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch database will see a combined $738 million in income tax savings. Meanwhile, that bill has severely cut funds for government services like Medicare health coverage, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and school lunches.
The AFL-CIO is a 70-year-old federation of more than 60 unions, representing 15 million-plus workers. It is highlighting CEO pay through this report to note how “the system is obviously broken,” Fred Redmond, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, said in a press conference. “Workers really have one concern in mind: They just want to share in the benefits and profits that they help to create every day. And the 285-to-1 ratio is not fair compensation to the workers.”
Skyrocketing CEO pay isn’t a recent issue; the gap between what a CEO takes home and what an average worker earns has been widening for years. Looking at the S&P Index specifically, the average CEO compensation package increased $6.5 million in the past decade alone, the report notes. In 1965, the pay ratio between CEOs and average workers was 20 to 1.
The median annual wage for workers in the U.S. across all industries was just $49,500 in 2024. At that wage, a worker would need to have been working since 1740 to earn what the average S&P 500 CEO took home in 2024.
Of course, CEO-to-worker-pay ratios also vary by individual company. In 2024, Starbucks’s new CEO, Brian Niccol, received upwards of $95 million in total compensation. That puts Starbucks’s CEO-to-median-worker-pay ratio at 6,666 to 1. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned $79 million in 2024, for a ratio of 408 to 1.
Along with cutting taxes for high earners, the Trump administration is considering no longer requiring this information be publicly disclosed to investors. In 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a rule requiring CEO-to-worker-pay ratio disclosures (that requirement didn’t go into effect until 2017).
But Trump’s SEC chair, Paul Atkins, has said that rules around executive compensation disclosure have grown “increasingly complex and lengthy,” and is reportedly considering loosening disclosure requirements, including around executive perks like the personal use of corporate jets.
The AFL-CIO is advocating for those disclosure requirements to remain as they are. “In our view, sunlight is the best disinfectant to prevent CEO pay, waste, fraud, and abuse,” Redmond said, “and we are urging visitors to the Executive Paywatch website to tell the SEC the importance of CEO pay disclosure.”
