Compensation Actually Paid vs the Summary Compensation Table

Why the same executive shows two different pay numbers

You are preparing for a comp committee conversation, and the proxy in front of you lists your total compensation twice — once in the Summary Compensation Table, once in a newer table further back, and the two numbers do not match. Neither is a typo. Since 2023, every proxy statement has carried a second, legally distinct measure of pay called "Compensation Actually Paid," and it is built to move differently than the number you have relied on for years. If you walk into a renewal or an offer negotiation quoting only the Summary Compensation Table figure, you are citing half the disclosure. By the end of this guide, you will be able to read both numbers in a real proxy, explain why they diverge, and reconcile them line by line before anyone across the table does it for you.

What the Summary Compensation Table actually measures

The Summary Compensation Table (SCT) is the older, more familiar disclosure. It reports salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive compensation, and other compensation for the company's top five most highly paid executive officers — typically the CEO, the CFO, and the next three highest earners — as required in the proxy statement, per Meridian Compensation Partners' 2025 summary of the rule. Crucially, the equity components in the SCT are reported at grant-date fair value: what the stock or option award was worth on the day the board approved it, regardless of what happens to the stock afterward. A CEO could be granted equity worth $10 million on paper, watch the stock fall 40% before it vests, and the SCT would still show $10 million for that year. It is a grant-accounting number, not a realized-value number.

What Compensation Actually Paid adds and subtracts

Compensation Actually Paid (CAP) exists precisely to correct for that mismatch. Item 402(v) of Regulation S-K, the Pay Versus Performance rule, was adopted on August 25, 2022 and became effective starting with 2023 proxy statements, per Mintz's 2022 analysis of the rule — and it requires companies to disclose CAP in a dedicated Pay Versus Performance table, tagged in Inline XBRL so the figures are both human-readable and machine-readable, per SEC.gov's 2024 guidance on the format. CAP starts from the SCT total and then strips out the grant-date fair value of equity awards, replacing it with the year-end or vesting-date fair value of that equity — meaning CAP moves up and down with the actual stock price, not with the accounting value assigned at grant. Notably, this table lives in the proxy statement itself, not in the Form 10-K, per Greenberg Traurig's 2023 note on the rule — so if you are pulling numbers from an annual report rather than the proxy, you will not find CAP there at all.

A worked reconciliation, line by line

The mechanics are easiest to see with a simplified, illustrative example — round numbers chosen to demonstrate the method, not pulled from a specific filing.

Say an executive's Summary Compensation Table total for the year is $15,000,000, made up of $2,000,000 in salary and bonus, plus $13,000,000 in stock and option awards valued at grant-date fair value.

To move from SCT total to CAP, the calculation broadly works like this:

1. Start with SCT total: $15,000,000.
2. Subtract grant-date fair value of equity granted during the year: −$13,000,000, leaving $2,000,000 in cash-based pay.
3. Add back the fair value of unvested equity granted in the current year, remeasured at year-end using the actual closing stock price instead of the grant-date price. If the stock rose and that equity is now worth $16,000,000, add $16,000,000.
4. Adjust for equity granted in prior years that vested or changed in value during the current year — add or subtract the change in fair value from the start of the year to the vesting date or year-end, whichever applies.
5. Sum the result to arrive at CAP for the year.

In this illustration, if the prior-year adjustments net to zero, CAP would land at roughly $18,000,000 — higher than the $15,000,000 SCT total, purely because the stock price rose after grant. Had the stock instead fallen, CAP could land well below SCT total for the identical grant. This is the entire point of the rule: CAP is meant to track what the executive's equity is actually worth today, not what the board approved on paper.

The Summary Compensation Table tells you what the board decided to award. Compensation Actually Paid tells you what that award is worth right now — and the two will rarely agree in a year of meaningful stock movement.

Why the gap matters when you're the one being paid

This distinction is not academic if you are the executive whose pay is being discussed. Median S&P 500 CEO total compensation reached $17.1 million in 2024, up 9.7% year-over-year, per the Equilar / Associated Press CEO Pay Study for 2025 covering fiscal year 2024 — and the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance's 2026 analysis of fiscal year 2024 filings notes that actual total direct compensation for median S&P 500 CEOs sat near $17 million, with long-term equity incentives remaining the primary driver of that figure. Separately, the AFL-CIO's 2025 Executive Paywatch report found average S&P 500 CEO pay at $18.9 million in 2024. These are all grant-date or averaged measures; none of them is a CAP figure, and none should be quoted as if it were. When you sit down to discuss your own renewal, your board's comp committee may already be looking at your CAP trend alongside your SCT trend — because Item 402(v) requires the company to plot CAP against total shareholder return and other performance measures over a multi-year window. If your CAP has been rising faster than your SCT total because the stock has performed well, that is a data point worth bringing into the room yourself, sourced correctly, rather than letting the committee frame it first.

How to read both numbers before your next comp conversation

Start by locating the actual Pay Versus Performance table in the proxy — not the Summary Compensation Table — since that is the only place Item 402(v) requires CAP to appear, tagged in Inline XBRL for machine readability. Read the footnotes closely: every proxy must disclose its equity-valuation assumptions and adjustment methodology, and those assumptions can differ slightly from company to company. Then build your own reconciliation, using the SCT total as your starting point and walking through each adjustment the footnotes describe, the way the worked example above does. If a footnote is genuinely ambiguous about which valuation date applies, that is a case for confirming directly with the filing's disclosure controls or with the company's investor relations contact, rather than guessing.

For a structured walkthrough of both tables side by side, the guide on what compensation actually paid means breaks down each adjustment category individually, and the companion piece on the Summary Compensation Table covers what belongs in the "total" column and what does not. If you want the full disclosure architecture — how Item 402(v) sits alongside the CEO Pay Ratio rule and what the Pay Versus Performance table requires beyond CAP alone — the broader explainer on pay versus performance disclosure is the next stop. And if you would rather work from an annotated version of a real filing than reconstruct the reconciliation from scratch each time, the Proxy Disclosure Decoder for Pay Ratio & Pay-Versus-Performance walks through both tables line by line against an actual proxy, marking exactly where SCT total ends and CAP adjustments begin.