Fair500 → Sectors
The median pay ratio ranges from 81:1 in Energy to 455:1 in Consumer Discretionary. Comparing companies within a sector is far more informative than comparing across them.
A pay ratio is only interpretable against the right peer group. Workforce composition drives these numbers more than pay policy does, and composition is largely determined by industry: an oil producer employs a few thousand petroleum engineers, a restaurant group employs a hundred thousand part-time servers. Comparing the two tells you about the industries, not the companies.
Each sector page below lists every S&P 500 company Fair500 covers in that industry, with its pay ratio, median worker pay, three-year average CEO compensation, profit and headcount.
79 companies · median worker pay $70,831
Median pay ratio 177:1
76 companies · median worker pay $97,852
Median pay ratio 191:1
72 companies · median worker pay $98,000
Median pay ratio 258:1
59 companies · median worker pay $80,380
Median pay ratio 213:1
48 companies · median worker pay $37,371
Median pay ratio 455:1
33 companies · median worker pay $57,720
Median pay ratio 263:1
31 companies · median worker pay $149,396
Median pay ratio 87:1
31 companies · median worker pay $119,871
Median pay ratio 123:1
26 companies · median worker pay $84,392
Median pay ratio 166:1
21 companies · median worker pay $162,405
Median pay ratio 81:1
18 companies · median worker pay $97,105
Median pay ratio 256:1
Sector median pay ratios track median worker pay almost inversely. Energy and Utilities, with the highest median wages in the index, have the narrowest ratios. Consumer Discretionary and Consumer Staples, with the lowest, have the widest.
This is the denominator effect operating at industry scale. It is not that restaurant chains pay their chief executives more than oil producers do. In absolute terms they generally pay less. It is that a sector built on part-time hourly labour has a median employee earning $15,000, and a sector built on skilled technical labour has one earning $160,000.
A useful consequence: a 300:1 ratio means something quite different depending on where you find it. In Consumer Discretionary it is better than the sector median. In Energy it would be the widest gap in the industry by a wide margin.
The sector spread on profit per employee is wider still, from about $31,600 in Consumer Discretionary to $476,467 in Energy, a fifteen-fold difference driven by capital intensity rather than by anything workers do differently. This is why Fair500's second measure, worker pay against profit per employee, is also best read within a sector. More on that here.
A note on sector classification. Companies are assigned to the sector under which they are classified in the index. Some assignments are debatable: several payment processors and exchanges sit in Financials rather than Technology, and a number of REITs own assets whose operations are conducted entirely by third parties. Where a company's classification materially affects how its figures should be read, the sector page says so.