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The widest CEO-to-worker pay gaps in the S&P 500

The median S&P 500 company pays its chief executive about 196 times its median employee. At the top of this list the multiple is more than twenty times that, and the reasons differ sharply from one company to the next.

By the Fair500 editors · Published 18 July 2026 · All figures from SEC filings · How these numbers are built

Every ratio below uses a three-year average of the chief executive's total compensation, divided by the company's disclosed median employee pay. That differs from the single-year figure companies publish, for reasons set out separately: equity grants land in one year and would otherwise dominate the ranking.

Three different phenomena, one league table

The most important thing about this list is that it is not measuring one thing. Companies arrive at the top by at least three distinct routes, and treating them as a single ranking of corporate behaviour is a mistake.

Low medians from offshore manufacturing

Lumentum at 2,884:1, Flex at 1,956:1, ON Semiconductor at 1,631:1, Western Digital at 1,320:1, Amphenol at 894:1. These are component makers and contract manufacturers with production workforces concentrated in Southeast Asia, Mexico and Eastern Europe. Their CEO packages, at $27.7 million, $25.3 million, $22.9 million, $11.5 million and $16.8 million, are unremarkable for companies of their size. Western Digital's chief executive is paid less than the S&P 500 median in absolute terms, and the company still posts a four-figure ratio.

What produces these numbers is a median employee earning under $15,000, which is what the midpoint of a global manufacturing workforce looks like. The disclosure rule requires companies to include their worldwide workforce, so the ratio divides an American executive salary by a global median. The arithmetic is correct; the implied comparison spans labour markets that have little to do with one another.

Low medians from part-time and seasonal work

Starbucks at 3,669:1, Ross Stores at 3,225:1, TJX at 1,608:1, Yum! Brands at 1,451:1, McDonald's at 1,015:1, Royal Caribbean at 1,063:1, Carnival at 1,055:1.

These are domestic-facing consumer businesses whose median employee works part-time, seasonally, or both. The median is a record of actual compensation received, so someone working twenty hours a week for part of the year enters at what they were actually paid. Starbucks reports a median of $17,279 across 381,000 people; TJX reports $14,994 across 377,000.

This tells you something real, namely that the business runs on part-time labour, which is a genuine structural fact with consequences for the people involved. It does not tell you that a full-time employee earns that amount.

Genuinely exceptional executive pay

The third group is the one the ratio was designed to surface, and it is identifiable by a simple test: the median is not low.

• Welltower, 2,290:1 against a median of $124,995. The ratio is high because the three-year average CEO compensation is $286.2 million, driven by a single grant valued at roughly $821 million. Even smoothed across three years, this is the largest executive compensation figure in the index.
• Intel, 809:1 against a median of $114,900, one of the better-paid workforces in the S&P 500. A three-year average of $93.0 million is what puts it here.
• Fiserv, 797:1 against a median of $88,295, with CEO compensation averaging $70.3 million.
• Coherent, 2,308:1, a hybrid case: a $52.6 million average package, inflated by a large inducement grant to a new chief executive, against a $22,791 median from a global photonics manufacturing base.

For these companies there is no compositional explanation available. The workforce is well paid by index standards and the ratio is still extreme, which means the numerator is doing the work.

Why the extremes are the least informative part of the data

Rank the 25 companies above against the full index on each half of the fraction separately, and a clear pattern emerges. Their CEO pay sits, on average, at the 72nd percentile, high but far from exceptional. Their median worker pay sits at the 10th percentile.

The tail of this distribution is built primarily out of low medians. That is worth holding onto, because a league table of pay ratios reads as a ranking of executive excess and is substantially a ranking of workforce composition. We publish it because the underlying disclosure is real and the comparison is one people want to make, but the ranking that follows is more useful for asking questions than for drawing conclusions. The full analysis of that effect is here.

A more defensible comparison

Comparing within an industry holds workforce structure roughly constant, which makes differences meaningful. The variation between sectors is large enough that cross-sector comparison is close to meaningless:

A 300:1 ratio is unremarkable in Consumer Discretionary and would be the widest in the Energy sector by a distance. The sector medians track median worker pay almost inversely, which is the same denominator effect operating at the level of whole industries: Energy and Utilities employ small numbers of highly paid technical staff, and retail and restaurants employ very large numbers of part-time ones.

Sector-by-sector breakdowns are here, each with the full company list for that industry.

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