S&P 500 chief executives averaged $22.8 million in compensation — 312 times the typical worker’s pay — as organized labor points to a widening divide between corporate wealth and household finances
Chief executives at America’s largest corporations received an average of $22.8 million in compensation last year, 312 times the pay of the median U.S. worker, as the gap between executive and worker compensation widened sharply, according to an AFL-CIO report released Aug. 13.
Average compensation for S&P 500 CEOs increased 21% in 2025, from $18.9 million the previous year, excluding an extraordinary compensation package awarded to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to the labor federation’s annual Executive Paywatch report. The CEO-to-worker ratio increased from 285-to-1 in 2024.
The AFL-CIO said the $22.8 million average represents the highest executive compensation in the three decades it has tracked CEO pay.
The report draws primarily from company proxy statements and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Executive Paywatch database contains compensation information for more than 3,800 corporations, according to the federation.
The findings arrive amid renewed political debate over income inequality, corporate power, taxation and the ability of working Americans to keep pace with rising living costs.
They also come with an enormous statistical complication named Elon Musk.
Musk compensation breaks the scale
The AFL-CIO excluded Musk’s 2025 Tesla compensation from its headline $22.8 million average because including it would radically distort the comparison with previous years.
The federation valued Musk’s 2025 compensation package at $158.3 billion, based on the grant-date fair value of restricted Tesla stock awarded during the year.
Including Musk would push average S&P 500 CEO compensation to approximately $340.1 million, nearly 18 times the previous year’s average, according to the report.
Musk’s compensation alone was about 14 times the combined compensation of every other S&P 500 CEO, the AFL-CIO said.
The figure requires an important qualification.
The $158.3 billion should not be understood as an ordinary salary or $158.3 billion deposited into Musk’s bank account during 2025. The figure represents the accounting value assigned to his performance-based stock award. Its ultimate value depends on Tesla achieving performance requirements.
The distinction does little, however, to make the scale ordinary.
The AFL-CIO calculated that Musk’s compensation was 2,522,203 times the $57,243 median compensation of a Tesla employee in 2025.
That mathematical outlier is why the federation removed Musk from its primary S&P 500 average.
Even after doing so, CEO compensation rose 21%.
Workers did not get the same raise
The report’s central argument is not merely that chief executives earn considerably more than their employees. That has been true for generations.
The AFL-CIO argues that the disparity is continuing to widen.
Excluding Musk, the average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio among S&P 500 companies increased from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025.
Put another way, a worker earning $60,000 annually would need 380 years to collect $22.8 million — assuming the worker spent none of it along the way.
The federation also said workers’ share of U.S. national income has fallen to its lowest level since World War II.
The report juxtaposed booming executive compensation with indicators of financial strain among American households.
According to figures assembled by the AFL-CIO, 16% of adults were unable to pay all of their bills in full, 26% had skipped medical care because of cost, 37% lacked enough cash to cover a $400 emergency expense and 23% of renters had fallen behind on rent during the previous year.
The federation also pointed to workers at major corporations including Amazon, Dollar Tree, FedEx, McDonald’s and Walmart as being among employees making significant use of Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other public benefits.
The AFL-CIO uses those figures to argue that taxpayers effectively subsidize some low-wage employment while executives and shareholders receive substantially larger portions of corporate wealth.
Trump’s income enters the labor debate
The report also departed from its traditional focus on corporate executives to scrutinize President Donald Trump’s personal income.
Citing Trump’s federal financial disclosures, the AFL-CIO calculated that Trump received about $2.2 billion in income in 2025, his first year back in the White House.
That represented an increase of nearly 254% from 2024, according to the federation.
The AFL-CIO attributed approximately $1.4 billion of Trump’s reported receipts to cryptocurrency ventures, including the $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business.
Using its median-worker calculation, the federation said an ordinary worker would have to work 43,154 years to receive the amount Trump reported for 2025.
The inclusion of Trump’s finances underscores the explicitly political nature of the AFL-CIO’s report.
The federation is not a neutral economic research organization. It represents nearly 15 million workers through 65 national and international unions and advocates policies intended to increase organized labor’s bargaining and political power.
It has also made defeating candidates it considers hostile to labor a central objective in the 2026 midterm elections.
Labor federation calls compensation ‘shameful’
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said the findings demonstrate an economy increasingly tilted toward executives and wealthy investors.
“As shown in our latest Paywatch report, executive compensation has reached a new, shameful high,” Redmond said.
He contrasted the fortunes accumulated by Musk and Trump with Americans struggling to buy food or pay utility bills.
Redmond said organized labor would respond by pushing for more union contracts and mobilizing union households ahead of the November elections.
The AFL-CIO says it intends to organize and mobilize about 16 million union voters to support candidates it considers pro-worker.
The federation argues collective bargaining can reduce compensation disparities by giving workers greater leverage over wages, benefits and working conditions.
CEO pay is more complicated than a paycheck
Executive compensation figures require some caution.
The millions of dollars reported as CEO compensation generally do not consist primarily of salary.
Large-company executives commonly receive combinations of base salary, annual bonuses, stock awards, stock options, incentive plans, retirement benefits and other compensation.
That means the value disclosed for a particular year can rise or fall dramatically with equity awards even when the executive does not immediately receive an equivalent amount of spendable cash.
The AFL-CIO’s methodology relies on compensation reported in the Summary Compensation Tables contained in corporate filings with the SEC.
Those are standardized federal disclosures, making comparisons possible across thousands of companies, but they measure compensation rather than simply cash wages.
The distinction is especially important with Musk because the extraordinary valuation of his Tesla award dwarfs conventional executive compensation.
But it does not explain away the broader trend.
Remove Musk entirely and average S&P 500 CEO compensation still climbed from $18.9 million to $22.8 million in a single year.
That increase — rather than Musk’s singular award — may ultimately be the more consequential finding.
A widening divide
Executive compensation has become one of the clearest symbols in America’s decades-long argument over economic inequality.
Companies generally defend large executive compensation packages as necessary to attract and retain leaders responsible for businesses worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of that compensation is frequently tied to stock prices or other performance measures intended to align executives’ interests with shareholders.
Critics contend that corporate boards have created a self-reinforcing system in which executive compensation is benchmarked against other highly paid executives, pushing compensation upward while ordinary employees lack comparable bargaining power.
The AFL-CIO firmly occupies the latter camp.
Its Executive Paywatch project has tracked the disparity since the 1990s, turning the CEO-to-worker ratio into an annual measurement of what organized labor sees as an increasingly unequal economy.
This year’s numbers give the federation plenty of ammunition.
Strip away Musk’s unprecedented compensation package and America’s largest corporations still paid their chief executives an average $22.8 million last year.
That works out to about $62,500 a day — every day of the year.
For millions of Americans, that is roughly a year’s wages.
For the average S&P 500 CEO in 2025, it was Tuesday.