How to Benchmark Your Own Executive Salary Against Public Filings

Why an Uncited Number Loses the Room

Ninety days before a comp committee renewal, most executives have gathered numbers with no common origin: a Glassdoor screenshot, a headline about "average CEO pay," a recruiter's off-the-record estimate. None of it names a filing. None of it survives the first question a comp committee chair asks — "where did that number come from?"

The committee itself is not improvising. It is very likely working from a report built by a compensation consultant using structured survey data. Equilar, for instance, sells executive-compensation data and surveys primarily to boards and compensation consultants — it has no individual-executive product and does not publish self-serve public pricing. Chief Executive Group publishes a compensation report built for companies setting executive pay, again aimed at the organization, not the person being paid. Both exist because boards value sourced comparables enough to pay institutional rates for them.

Meanwhile, the tools most executives reach for personally — Glassdoor, Comparably, and similar consumer lookups — publish executive pay as a free, crowdsourced feature with no SEC or Form 990 citation attached and no percentile-positioned negotiation artifact behind it. A number with no named origin is an opinion. A number that cites a specific DEF 14A Summary Compensation Table, a specific tax year's Form 990 Schedule J, or a named academic study is evidence.

This is the asymmetry every executive walks into: the committee's case is sourced, the individual's case usually isn't. Closing that gap does not require an institutional subscription. It requires knowing how to read the same public filings a consultant reads, and how to structure what you find into a peer-benchmarked, percentile-positioned case. That is what the rest of this guide walks through — and it is the exact discipline behind how to benchmark your own executive salary credibly enough to use in a real negotiation.

How to Benchmark Your Own Executive Salary: Where the Data Actually Lives

Before building a peer set, it helps to know precisely where CEO and executive pay data legally has to live, because that determines what you can cite and what you can only estimate.

Every US public company must disclose compensation for its principal executive officer, principal financial officer, and its next three most highly paid executive officers — the named executive officers, or NEOs — in the Summary Compensation Table of its proxy statement, per Meridian Compensation Partners' 2025 guidance on Regulation S-K disclosure. That table is the anchor document: base salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive pay, and other compensation, itemized by year, for the top five people in the building.

Two additional disclosures layer on top of it. The CEO Pay Ratio rule — Item 402(u) of Regulation S-K, adopted August 5, 2015 under Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act — requires companies to disclose the ratio of CEO total compensation to the total compensation of the median employee, according to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance's 2015 summary of the rule. Pay Versus Performance — Item 402(v), adopted August 25, 2022 and effective for 2023 proxies per Mintz's 2022 analysis — goes further, requiring companies to tag their executive pay and performance disclosures in Inline XBRL, a structured data language that produces a single document readable by both people and machines, as SEC.gov describes it in 2024 guidance.

Two details matter for anyone trying to pull this data themselves. First, Pay Versus Performance disclosure belongs in the proxy or information statement, not the Form 10-K — Greenberg Traurig's 2023 client alert is explicit that the machine-readable pay data lives in the proxy, so that is the document to search, not the annual report. Second, all of it is free. SEC EDGAR provides public access to every filing at no cost, and SEC EDGAR's own guidance describing the system is itself public domain, per SEC.gov's 2025 documentation. There is no paywall between an individual executive and the same primary-source data a consultant works from — only the friction of knowing where to look.

For nonprofit executives and executive directors, the equivalent document is Form 990, specifically Schedule J, which reports compensation for officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and the highest-compensated employees, according to IRS guidance updated in 2024. Since the Taxpayer First Act took effect on July 1, 2019, per Holland & Knight's 2019 analysis, nonprofits have been required to e-file Form 990 in structured form — which is what makes named-officer nonprofit compensation available as searchable, structured data rather than scanned paper.

If you want a deeper walk-through of the proxy document itself, see our guide on how to read a DEF 14A proxy statement and the companion breakdown of the Summary Compensation Table, which explains column-by-column what each pay component means and where the total compensation figure actually gets calculated.

Reading the Filings That Matter

Knowing where the data lives is only step one. Reading it correctly is where most self-guided benchmarking attempts go wrong.

Start with the Summary Compensation Table for your target peer company. It's not a single number — it's a wall of columns spanning up to three fiscal years, broken into salary, bonus, stock awards (usually the largest line for public-company CEOs), option awards, non-equity incentive plan compensation, change in pension value, and "all other compensation," which can bury perquisites, tax gross-ups, or severance accruals. The "Total" column at the far right is the number most people quote — but it mixes cash already paid with equity that is granted, not realized, and won't turn into cash unless performance conditions are met years later.

That distinction matters more than it looks. The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance's 2026 analysis of fiscal-year-2024 filings notes that long-term incentives — chiefly performance equity — remain the primary driver of CEO pay, meaning a headline total compensation figure is disproportionately a bet on future stock performance, not a guaranteed cash number. When you benchmark your own pay, decide up front whether you're comparing total reported compensation (the SEC's required disclosure) or something closer to realized or targeted cash pay — and be explicit about which one you're citing, to whoever you're presenting it to.

Next, cross-reference the Pay Versus Performance table in the same proxy. It restates a subset of NEO compensation alongside "compensation actually paid," a figure adjusted for changes in equity value during the year — useful because it can diverge sharply from the Summary Compensation Table total in a volatile stock year. Because this table is Inline XBRL-tagged, it's also machine-readable, which is exactly the property that lets a benchmarking tool — including CEOSalary — parse it programmatically and cross-validate it against the Summary Compensation Table rather than relying on either disclosure alone.

Finally, check the CEO Pay Ratio disclosure for context on internal pay structure, and note the filing date and fiscal year on everything you pull. A proxy filed in spring 2025 reports fiscal-year-2024 compensation; using it to argue for a 2026 offer without adjusting for a year of pay growth is a common, avoidable error.

Building a Compensation Peer Group by Size, Sector, and Region

A single company's pay figure, however carefully read, is not a benchmark. A benchmark requires a peer group — and peer group construction is where most individual attempts collapse, usually by comparing against companies that are the wrong size, wrong sector, or wrong ownership structure.

Four criteria do most of the work:

Revenue or asset size band. Pay scales with organizational scale far more reliably than with title alone. A CEO of a $200 million company and a CEO of a $20 billion company hold the same title but are not comparable; peer sets should be built around companies within a defined revenue or asset band of the target role.

Sector. Standard sector-classification systems — SIC and NAICS codes — exist precisely to define comparable industry peer groups, and using one consistently prevents cross-industry noise (a healthcare-system CEO compared against a retail CEO tells you little, even at matched revenue).

Region and ownership type. Public-company pay practices differ from private-equity-owned company practices, which differ again from nonprofit governance norms. The US private equity landscape alone comprised roughly 6,000 PE firms and 21,000 PE-backed portfolio companies in 2024, according to EY's analysis for the American Investment Council in 2025 — a large enough universe that PE-backed executive pay needs its own comparison logic, distinct from public-market peers governed by SEC disclosure rules.

Peer group size. A peer set with too few companies produces a percentile position that shifts wildly with a single outlier. This is why CEOSalary applies a minimum peer-group-size gate before generating a percentile position — a comparison built from three companies is not disclosed as a reliable benchmark, regardless of how well-matched those three companies are on paper.

Scale matters here too. The Russell 3000 index alone measures roughly 3,000 US companies and represents approximately 98% of investable US equity market cap, per LSEG/FTSE Russell's 2025 index methodology — a large enough universe that revenue-banded, sector-matched peer groups are almost always available for public-company benchmarking, even in a narrow industry. For a deeper look at how pay scales specifically by company size, see CEO pay by company size.

Nonprofit peer construction follows the same logic with a different filing base. Candid's 25th annual Nonprofit Compensation Report, covering fiscal year 2023, analyzed 217,556 compensation records from 130,794 tax-exempt organizations — a large enough sample that nonprofit executive directors can build genuine sector-and-budget-band peer groups rather than relying on a handful of comparable organizations' publicly posted Form 990s.

Calculating Your CEO Total Compensation Percentile

Once a peer group is built, the next step is positioning your own pay — or the pay you're negotiating — against it. Percentile positioning (typically the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of the peer group) is the standard convention because it answers the question a comp committee actually asks: not "what does the average company pay," but "where does this offer sit relative to comparable roles."

Public market-wide figures illustrate the mechanics, even though your own peer group will be narrower and more specific. Median S&P 500 CEO total compensation was $17.1 million in 2024, up 9.7% year-over-year, according to the Equilar/Associated Press CEO Pay Study for 2025 covering fiscal year 2024. The average was higher still — $18.9 million in 2024, per AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch's 2025 analysis, which also found the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio reached 285:1 that year. The gap between median and average is itself informative: a small number of very large equity-driven packages pull the average well above the median, which is why percentile positioning against a matched peer group is more useful than comparing against either single figure.

Pay ratio disclosures add another layer of context. The S&P 500 median CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio rose to 196:1 in 2023, with the median S&P 500 employee earning $81,467 that year, per the Equilar/Associated Press CEO Pay Study for 2024. And the gap between CEO pay and the rest of the executive team is itself disclosed and comparable: all non-CEO named executive officers' total compensation summed to 38% of CEO pay in the Russell 3000 and 31% in the S&P 500 for 2024, according to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance's 2025 analysis — a useful reference point for a CFO or COO benchmarking their own position against the CEO role, not just against outside peers.

As a worked example of the arithmetic itself: if your five-company peer set reports total compensation of $4.2M, $5.1M, $5.6M, $6.3M, and $7.8M, the median (50th percentile) is $5.6M, and you sit below it if your current pay is $4.8M — a defensible, arithmetic starting point for the conversation, independent of any single company's number. Real peer sets should be larger than five, but the method scales directly.

Nonprofit percentile benchmarking uses the same logic against a different base. Candid's 2025 report found median nonprofit executive compensation varying sharply by program area for fiscal year 2023 — $68,958 in religion, $109,600 in food, agriculture, and nutrition, and $202,490 in science and technology research — a spread wide enough that sector-matching, not organization size alone, drives an accurate nonprofit percentile position. The same report also found that at nonprofits with budgets above $50 million, female CEOs earned 75 cents per dollar versus male CEOs and led just 31% of such organizations, versus 58% of nonprofits under $250,000 in budget — a structural pattern worth knowing before assuming your own offer reflects market rate rather than a documented gap.

For a full breakdown of percentile methodology, see CEO total compensation percentile.

Executive Compensation Consultants vs Benchmarking It Yourself

Given how much of this data is public, the real question is not whether the numbers exist, but who has historically been able to assemble them efficiently — and for whom.

Equilar's data and survey products are built for boards and the consultants boards retain; it does not sell a self-serve individual product, and it does not publish public pricing, consistent with an institutional sales model rather than a personal one. Chief Executive Group's compensation survey is likewise built for companies setting executive pay — useful if you're the one deciding what to pay someone, not if you're the one being paid. Neither is designed to answer "where do I personally sit" from the seat of the executive.

At the other end, free consumer tools like Glassdoor publish executive pay as a crowdsourced feature — useful for a rough sense of a role, but without SEC or Form 990 citation attached to any individual figure, and without a percentile-positioned peer group behind it. It's a data point, not a case.

An executive pay figure that names its origin — a specific proxy filing, a specific Form 990 tax year, a named study with its vintage — carries more weight at the table than any uncited number, however precise it looks.

This is the gap CEOSalary is built to close for the individual executive specifically. It parses public SEC DEF 14A Summary Compensation Tables, cross-validates them against XBRL-tagged Pay-Versus-Performance and CEO Pay Ratio disclosures, and ingests IRS Form 990 Part VII and Schedule J data from bulk e-filed XML for nonprofit roles. From there, it builds a peer set by revenue band, sector, region, and ownership type — gated by a minimum peer-group size — and computes percentile positioning at the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th marks, with every individual figure citing the filing it came from. The output is a source-cited negotiation document, built for the person sitting across from the committee, not for the committee itself.

You can do the underlying work by hand using EDGAR and IRS bulk data directly — this guide walks through exactly how. What a structured tool changes is the time it takes to do it at peer-group scale, and the confidence of knowing every figure in the final document traces back to a named filing rather than a memory of a headline.

Turning the Benchmark Into a Negotiation

A percentile position is only useful once it's applied to the specific decision in front of you — a renewal, an offer, a severance clause, or a multi-offer comparison. The filings that matter shift depending on which of these you're facing.

For a scheduled renewal or new offer, the Summary Compensation Table and Pay Versus Performance disclosure of your peer group carry the most weight, framed against the percentile position described above. It's also worth knowing the broader hiring context: 2,221 CEOs exited their roles in 2024, a record, before falling 9% to 2,032 exits in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas's 2026 report. External hiring has been rising sharply — S&P 500 external CEO hires nearly doubled from 18% in 2024 to 33% in 2025, pushing internal promotions below 70% for the first time in eight years, per the Conference Board's 2025 research — and 84% of the 2025 S&P 1500 incoming CEO class were first-time CEOs, the largest incoming class since 2010, according to Spencer Stuart's 2026 report. Median CEO tenure itself has been shrinking, falling roughly 20% from 6.0 years in 2013 to 4.8 years in 2022, per the Harvard Law School Forum's 2023 analysis citing Equilar data — context that makes a well-benchmarked renewal conversation more, not less, urgent. And boards face little binding pressure to resist a well-supported ask: only about 1.2% of Russell 3000 say-on-pay votes failed in 2024, down from 2.1% in 2023, per the Harvard Law School Forum's 2025 analysis — meaning most negotiated packages proceed without a shareholder veto once a board has agreed to them.

For a severance or change-of-control clause, different filings and different math apply. CEO change-of-control cash severance has typically run around 3 times salary plus bonus, with other named executive officers around 2 to 3 times, according to CompensationStandards.com's 2007 analysis; more recent data from Alvarez & Marsal's 2022 study found the most common CEO change-of-control cash severance multiple sits in the 2 to 2.99 times range, with accelerated equity vesting — not cash — the largest component of most packages. Any clause should also be checked against IRC Section 280G: if the present value of parachute payments reaches 3 times a base amount, a 20% excise tax applies to the excess, and the company loses the corresponding tax deduction, per Plante Moran's 2021 guidance — a threshold worth confirming precisely with tax counsel or the filing itself before signing anything close to it. A deeper walk-through of this math lives at executive severance package negotiation.

Once the peer set, the percentile, and the relevant filing citations are in hand, the negotiation conversation itself is a separate skill — covered in full at how to negotiate CEO compensation. To start building your own peer comparison without assembling every spreadsheet from scratch, the Quick-Start Peer Comparison Worksheet walks through the same size, sector, and region criteria described above in a fillable format.