The pay of the CEOs of Britain’s biggest companies increased by 2.2% in 2023 according to a report out today by the High Pay Centre.
Their report argues that excessive spending on top earners by leading firms makes it harder to fund pay increases for the wider UK workforce.
Median pay for a FTSE 100 CEO increased from £4.1m in 2022 to £4.19m in 2022. This is the highest level of FTSE 100 CEO pay on record, although the growth in CEO pay levels are slower than in the past two years, when there was post-pandemic bounce.
Mean FTSE 100 pay grew from £4.42 million to £4.98 million – a 12.2% and over £500k increase.
Our research shows that the median FTSE 100 CEO is now paid 120 times the median UK full time worker, down from 124:1 in 2022, but still higher than 108:1 in 2021.
FTSE 100 firms spent £755m on the pay of 222 executives while the number of FTSE 100 companies awarding eight-figure pay packages of over £10m more than doubled, from four firms in 2022 to nine in 2023
“The increase in average CEO pay reflects a small number of companies making really large pay awards rather than big increases across the board,” said Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre.
