A Growing Divide In Private Company CEO Pay

In recent years, private company CEO incentive pay has remained relatively flat, while salaries have lagged inflation for four years running. This year is no different. Over half of companies expect to keep bonuses the same. Only the largest are raising total pay.

In Chief Executive Group Research’s 2026 CEO & Senior Leader Compensation Report, 52 percent of companies report no expected change at all to the CEO bonus in 2027. Another 4 percent expect to pay less. These figures are hardly news given the pattern of the past few years, but this year the freeze is even wider in scope: 53 percent of companies plan the same for frontline and the back-office staff, and 49 percent for division heads. Nobody in the building is getting much more in bonus pay next year.

What sets CEOs apart is not the proportion whose companies anticipate no change to their bonus but those at the other end of the range. Among company respondents, 13 percent expect a CEO bonus increase of 10 percent or more next year. Just 3 percent expect the same for back-office staff, and 4 percent for front-line staff. The CEO is four times more likely than frontline or back-office staff to get a large increase, and about tied with anyone else to get a cut.

This is the real divide. CEO pay is becoming a freeze or a windfall—while everyone else gets something predictable.

When that data is examined by company size, another pattern emerges. Among respondents from companies with less than $10 million in revenue, 60 percent expect no change to the CEO bonus, and only 9 percent expect a raise of 10 percent or more. Among companies with between $250 million and $500 million in revenue, 42 percent expect no change to the CEO bonus while 17 percent expect double-digit increases. The numbers show that CEOs at the smallest companies are the likeliest to be looking at the same bonus payout.

None of this is unusual. Historical data depicts an established pattern over a decade.

Better Targets for a Narrowing Bonus

Chief Executive’s research also shows that the way companies and CEOs forecast bonuses is changing. Each year, we ask companies what they expect to pay their CEO in bonus the following year. For three years running—2022, then 2023, then 2024—the median expected bonus was exactly $100,000. What companies actually paid was $77,850, then $80,000, then $76,700. That marks three consecutive years of estimates that were roughly $20,000 to $25,000 above reality.

Then the forecast changed. For 2025, they predicted $80,000 then paid $78,144, almost on target. For 2026, they forecasted $80,000 again.

Every year companies expected an end to the tumult and a semblance of recovery. Somewhere between 2024 and 2025, company respondents abandoned the idea that the bonus was going to revive and started forecasting the present instead.

It is worth noting the one year they got it wrong in the other direction. In the spring of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic-related shutdowns, companies predicted a median CEO bonus of $30,000. They paid $80,000.

CEO Salary Raises Over the Years

In 2017, the median private-company CEO earned a base salary of $250,000. Today, that number is $329,000, up from $323,109 in 2025. That amounts to a raise of about 32 percent over a decade, which doesn’t sound bad until the rising rate of consumer prices—36 percent from 2017 to 2026—is taken into account.

Putting the two side by side, the gap is easy to see. Take that 2017 salary of $250,000 and move it upward each year by the inflation rate. By 2020 it would need to be $263,735 to track inflation, and the median CEO was getting $275,000, landing comfortably ahead. By 2022, the two had almost converged. In 2023, the salary line lagged behind for the first time, by about $448. In 2024, the gap was $2,209. In 2025, the median private company CEO base salary fell $4,648 behind. This year, the gap is roughly $9,900—the widest shortfall of the decade, and the fourth year running that the gap has widened, even as global tensions fuel higher inflation rate increases during 2026.

Large Companies Fared Better

Of course, in addition to the cash component of base salary and bonus, CEO compensation includes equity, benefits and perks. When examining CEO total compensation from 2017 to 2025 sorted by company size, it’s clear that the largest companies fared the best, with the smallest struggling to keep up. Only companies with revenues between $1 billion and $9.9 billion saw total CEO compensation keeping up with inflation over the same timeframe—up 31.4 percent compared with price hikes of 31.1 percent.

For companies with less than $2 million in revenue, median total CEO compensation rose from $179,800 to $189,116 over eight years, a rise of just 5 percent. Within the $500 million to $999 million band, median pay rose from $880,595 to $1,000,382, up 14 percent but still not keeping up with inflation.

The pattern that emerged for median private company CEO compensation packages is grim. Salaries rose 32 percent while prices rose 36 percent. Nine of ten size bands fell behind.

Two Kinds of Equity

How did the CEOs of the largest private companies keep up when nobody else did? The answer isn’t cash. It’s equity.

Among private companies with between $1 billion and $9.9 billion in revenue, the median CEO received a new equity grant worth $130,000 in 2025. Above $10 billion, that grant was $483,805. In every one of the nine revenue bands below $1 billion, the median new equity grant was zero.

The same split shows up in equity gains. Median equity appreciation was zero in every band below $100 million in revenue. It was $27,600 at the $100 million to $249.9 million revenue range, $120,000 at the $500 million to $999.9 million range, $475,000 at the $1 billion to $9.9 billion range and $850,000 for those with $10 billion in revenue. The median equity value CEOs held is similar: $396,000 for the smallest companies against $7.1 million at $1 billion to $9.9 billion. Meanwhile smaller company CEOs are much more likely to own large portions of their company.

Larger private companies are increasingly designing compensation plans to mirror public company practices. Among companies offering equity incentives, the share relying solely on time-based vesting fell from 56.5 percent in 2019 to 47.4 percent in 2025, while the use of plans combining time- and performance-based vesting rose from 22.5 percent to 34.1 percent.

There’s a reason for that shift. When recruiting, a private company with more than $1 billion in revenue competes with public companies as well as other private firms—and public company compensation practices have been moving in the opposite direction as non-public firms.

Median S&P 500 CEO pay rose 5.9 percent in 2025 to $17.7 million, the slowest annual growth for that group since 2022. The 100 highest-paid public company CEOs saw a 23 percent increase, to a median of $29.4 million. At the same time, public company CEO perks—the line item that covers the car and the club—rose 17.7 percent to a median of $310,369. That one part of the package is worth 94 percent of the entire base salary of the median private company chief executive.

The largest private firms competing with these public companies for CEO and senior executive talent have had to keep up on compensation. Everyone below the $1 billion line gets some fraction of the arrangement at best—appreciation without grants in the middle of the market and neither appreciation nor grants for the median CEO below $100 million.

What’s Left in the Package

Benefits and perks have also been dropping for most CEOs. In 2017, 58 percent of private company chief executives had a company car or a car allowance. Today, 42 percent do. It is the single biggest change anywhere in the benefits and perks package. Company-paid personal technology fell from 95 percent to 86 percent. Golf and country club membership dropped from 20 percent to 13 percent, spouse travel from 15 percent to 9 percent, and tax gross-ups from 12 percent to 7 percent. Access to the company aircraft, from 6 percent to 3 percent.

Two things went up meaningfully: life insurance, from 81 percent to 85 percent, and supplemental life insurance, from 42 percent to 50 percent.

Gone are many of the ordinary perks of the job—the car, the parking space, the club, the phone—and what has replaced it is a slightly better death benefit. At least the kids will be better off.

This article is based on data from the just-released CEO & Senior Executive Compensation for U.S. Private Companies 2026-2027 Report produced by Chief Executive Group. The report offers the most detailed and statistically valid benchmark data on each compensation component (salaries, bonuses, equity, benefits and perks) for CEOs and eight other senior executive positions by quartile based on company size, industry, ownership type, geography, growth rate, level of profitability and more. For additional information, visit chiefexecutive.net/compensationreport.