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ceo pay
CEOs Get Rich Underpaying Their Workers and Then Don't Stand Up for Them
How have the largest employers of low-wage workers responded to these threats? This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report takes a look by zeroing in on the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.” The country’s most profitable retailers, fast food chains, and hospitality firms dominate the list.
Low-Wage 100 CEOs Have Remained Silent About Threats to Workers
Our key finding: Low-Wage 100 CEOs have raised nary a peep about ICE attacks on their employees or the gutting of our social safety net. And, with few exceptions, they have obediently rolled back DEI programs.
By looking the other way as low-wage workers face surging threats, corporate CEOs have shown even more clearly that we cannot rely on them to voluntarily do the right thing.
How did these corporate leaders choose to deploy their vast political power instead? Passage of the July 2025 budget bill was a top priority. This legislation will throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to pay for more tax cuts for the rich and a massive increase in ICE funding.
Under the bill’s reduced top marginal tax rate, chief executives will be able to take home an even greater share of their fat paychecks. In 2025, average CEO compensation within the Low-Wage 100 hit $17.5 million. By contrast, the group’s average median worker pay sat at just $36,571 and their average CEO-worker pay gap came to 614 to 1.
Low-Wage 100 Firms Won Tax Cuts for the Rich, Paid for With Cuts to Aid Programs Their Employees Rely On
We reviewed public statements about this budget legislation by Low-Wage 100 firms and the corporate lobby groups that represent them. Each statement cheered the law’s tax cuts, which will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. The International Franchise Association even praised the doubling of the estate tax exemption, a tax break that will benefit less than 0.2% of the population.
Not one statement expressed concern about the law’s drastic Medicaid and SNAP cuts. A recent Government Accountability Office report lists the top employers of workers receiving Medicaid and SNAP in a sampling of states where this information is available. Low-Wage 100 firms dominate the lists.
Long-Term Trends of Executive Excess
Given past trends, Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ muted response to the increased threats against their employees is hardly a surprise. The pandemic opened the eyes of many Americans to the essential value of frontline low-wage workers. But even that national crisis did not lead to more equitable sharing of corporate wealth.
Between 2019 and 2025, the Low-Wage 100’s average CEO pay rose 41.4%, double the 20.7% increase in their average median worker pay.
A technical note: we did not adjust these figures for US inflation because median pay figures in corporate SEC filings are based on a company’s global workforce. But many Low-Wage 100 firms have the vast majority of their employees in the United States. In fact, that’s the case for 5 of the 10 Low-Wage 100 corporations with the lowest median pay (Ross Stores, Ulta Beauty, TJX, Yum! Brands, and Dollar Tree).
Buybacks Bonanza
To further enrich their wealthy executives, Low-Wage 100 firms have spent over $718 billion repurchasing their own stock over the past seven years. This formerly illegal financial maneuver artificially boosts the value of a company’s shares and, in the process, pumps up the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80% of corporate CEO compensation.
Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar not spent on worker wages or long-term productive investments. The Lowe’s home improvement store’s $46.8 billion expenditures on buybacks over the past seven years could have covered the cost of a $24,235 bonus for each of their 276,000 employees every year during that period. Median pay at Lowe’s in 2025: $37,371.
Policy Changes to Curb Executive Excess
The Low-Wage 100 represent a business model designed to deliver staggering personal gains for top executives by squeezing their workers. This predominant model is shredding our social fabric and threatening our democracy. We clearly need to build worker power and raise the minimum wage to a living wage. But to solve this problem we also need to curb runaway CEO pay.
Governments at all levels should explore options for leveraging tax policies and procurement and subsidy policies against executive excess. These policy solutions have serious bipartisan potential.
For instance, one survey found that 89% of Democratic and 71% of Republican likely voters support a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEO over 50 or more times what they pay their median employees. A bipartisan provision in the pending Senate defense authorization bill would bar military contractors from engaging in CEO pay-inflating stock buybacks.
Congress should also increase the existing 1% stock buybacks tax, ideally to a level high enough to discourage this activity. But even if companies continued the wasteful practice, hiking this tax would generate additional revenue for combatting inequality. If a 4% buyback levy had been in place between 2023 and 2025, the Low-Wage 100 would have owed approximately $9.3 billion in additional federal taxes.
By looking the other way as low-wage workers face surging threats, corporate CEOs have shown even more clearly that we cannot rely on them to voluntarily do the right thing. Lawmakers must take responsible action to narrow our dangerous economic divides.
Pope Leo Is Right: Uber-Wealthy CEOs Like Musk Are Paid Too Much
Pope Leo appears to be particularly baffled by the Tesla pay package that could turn Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.
“What does that mean and what’s that about?” the Pope asked. “If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”
We are indeed in big trouble. But we are not without solutions.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) are spearheading an effort behind one particularly promising solution: hefty tax hikes on companies with huge gaps between their CEO and median worker pay.
Their recently introduced Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would base the CEO-worker pay ratio on five-year averages of the total compensation for a firm’s highest-paid executive and median worker. The tax increases would start at 0.5 percentage points on companies with gaps of 50 to 1 and top out at five percentage points on firms that pay their CEO more than 500 times median worker pay.
Potential Revenue From 10 Leading Corporations
How much might specific companies owe under the bill if they refuse to narrow their gaps? At the Institute for Policy Studies, we ran the numbers on 10 leading US corporations with large pay ratios. We found, for example, that Walmart, with a five-year average pay gap of 1,091 to 1, would have owed as much as $929 million in extra federal taxes in 2024 if this legislation had been in effect.
Amazon, with an even wider gap of 1,995 to 1 and higher profits, would’ve owed as much as an additional $3.1 billion last year.
Source: Institute for Policy Studies analysis of compensation data in proxy statements and US pre-tax income figures from 10-K filings.
Home Depot would have owed as much as $725 million more in 2024 taxes under this legislation. Like most of these companies, the home improvement giant can’t claim to be short on cash. Over the past six years, they’ve blown nearly $38 billion on stock buybacks, a maneuver that artificially inflates a CEO’s stock-based pay. With the money the firm spent on stock buybacks, Home Depot could’ve given every one of their 470,100 employees six annual $13,423 bonuses.
Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Pay Package
Sen. Sanders pointed out that if Elon Musk receives the full $975 billion compensation package that Tesla’s board has proposed, Tesla could owe up to $100 billion more in taxes over the next decade under this legislation.
“The Pope is exactly right,” wrote Sanders in a social media post. “No society can survive when one man becomes a trillionaire while the vast majority struggle to just survive—trying to put food on the table, pay rent, and afford healthcare. We can and must do better.”
“Working people are sick and tired of corporate greed,” Rep. Tlaib added in a press release. “It’s disgraceful that corporations continue to rake in record profits by exploiting the labor of their workers. Every worker deserves a living wage and human dignity on the job.”
Additional original co-sponsors of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act include: Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and 22 members of the House of Representatives.
Polling suggests that Americans across the political spectrum would support the bill. One 2024 survey, for instance, found that 80% of likely voters favor a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs more than 50 times more than what they pay their median employees. Large majorities in every political group gave the idea the thumbs up, including 89% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 71% of Republicans.
In these hyperpolarized times, Americans of diverse backgrounds, faiths, and political perspectives seem to share enormous common ground on at least one problem facing our nation: the extreme economic divides within our country’s largest corporations.
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