How to Find CEO Salary on SEC EDGAR

Why the Filing Beats a Lookup Site

You have a counteroffer to draft. The incoming role comes with a base salary number and a vague promise of "market-competitive" equity, and you want to know what the last person in that seat — or a comparable CEO at a similar-revenue company — actually made. A quick search turns up a handful of aggregator sites with confident-looking dollar figures and no indication of where those figures came from or which fiscal year they cover.

That gap matters more than it looks. A compensation committee that sets pay off a structured survey will not be moved by a number you cannot source. A number pulled from the company's own legally required disclosure — with a filing date, a fiscal year, and a page reference attached — carries weight an aggregator figure never will.

That disclosure already exists, filed under law, and it is free to read. You do not need a subscription or a data vendor to see it. You need to know where public companies are required to put it and how to open the right document once you get there. By the end of this guide, you will be able to pull an exact, filing-cited salary and total compensation figure for any public company CEO in under ten minutes.

How to Find CEO Salary on SEC EDGAR in Five Steps

EDGAR — the SEC's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system — provides free public access to the filings every publicly traded US company is required to submit, per SEC.gov (2025). Here is the direct path to a CEO's disclosed pay.

1. Go to the EDGAR company search. From sec.gov/edgar, search by company name or ticker rather than a keyword — this takes you straight to that company's filing history.
2. Filter the filing type to DEF 14A. DEF 14A is the form code for a definitive proxy statement, the document a company sends shareholders ahead of its annual meeting. This is where compensation disclosures live, not the annual report or the 10-K.
3. Open the most recent DEF 14A. Companies file one annually, generally a few months before the annual meeting, so the newest one on the list will cover the most recently completed fiscal year in most cases.
4. Use the document's internal navigation or your browser's find function. Search the filing text for "Summary Compensation Table" — nearly every DEF 14A uses that exact heading, since it is a standard, mandated table format.
5. Read the CEO's row. The named executive officer (NEO) rows are typically ordered with the principal executive officer — the CEO — listed first.

If you take away one habit from learning how to find CEO salary on SEC EDGAR, make it this: always confirm the fiscal year printed in the table header before you use the number. A proxy filed in spring 2025 typically reports on fiscal year 2024, and comparing a stale figure against a current offer is a quiet but common mistake.

Reading the Summary Compensation Table Once You're Inside the DEF 14A

The Summary Compensation Table is not one number — it is several, and conflating them is where most non-specialist readers go wrong. Proxy statements must generally disclose compensation for the top five most highly paid executive officers, including the CEO and CFO, in this table, per Meridian Compensation Partners (2025). For each NEO, you will typically see separate columns for:

• Salary — the base cash amount, usually the smallest line for a CEO at a large company.
• Bonus — discretionary cash awards, increasingly rare as a standalone line at larger companies.
• Stock awards and option awards — the grant-date fair value of equity compensation, often the largest component.
• Non-equity incentive plan compensation — performance-based cash, paid against pre-set metrics.
• Change in pension value and nonqualified deferred compensation earnings.
• All other compensation — perquisites, matching contributions, and similar items.
• Total — the sum of the row.

If a headline figure quoted elsewhere calls itself "CEO salary" but sits close to a total-compensation-sized number, it is almost certainly quoting the total column, not the base salary column. For a full column-by-column walkthrough, see our guide on how the Summary Compensation Table is built and read.

The salary column tells you what a CEO is guaranteed. The total column tells you what the board believes they earned. Confusing the two is the single most common misread of a proxy statement.

DEF 14A vs. 10-K: Why the 10-K Won't Have the Number You Want

It is a natural instinct to look for pay data inside the annual report — the 10-K — since that is the document most investors read first for financial results. It will not have what you need. Pay Versus Performance disclosure under Item 402(v) is required in the proxy or information statement, not the Form 10-K, per Greenberg Traurig (2023). Executive compensation tables, including the Summary Compensation Table, follow the same pattern: they belong to the proxy statement (DEF 14A), filed separately from the 10-K on its own schedule.

Searching a 10-K for CEO salary wastes time on a document that was never built to hold it. If you want the mechanical difference laid out side by side — what each filing discloses, when each is filed, and why — our companion piece on DEF 14A versus 10-K executive compensation covers it in detail.

Searching Across Multiple Companies with EDGAR Full Text Search

Looking up one company is straightforward once you know the DEF 14A path. Building a peer comparison — five or ten similarly sized companies in the same sector — is a different task, and EDGAR's full text search tool is built for exactly that kind of cross-filing search rather than a single company lookup. It lets you search filing text across companies and time periods rather than browsing one filer's history at a time.

Learning to use full text search well is worth the time if you are trying to build even a rough, informal peer set on your own — comparing a handful of named companies' disclosed CEO pay before a negotiation, rather than relying on a single data point. Our dedicated walkthrough on SEC EDGAR full text search for executive compensation covers query syntax and filter options in more depth.

Cross-Checking the Number: Pay Versus Performance and Inline XBRL

Once you have a Summary Compensation Table figure, there is a second, machine-readable disclosure worth checking against it. Item 402(v), the Pay Versus Performance rule, was adopted August 25, 2022, and took effect for 2023 proxy statements, mandating Inline XBRL tagging of the disclosed figures, per Mintz (2022). Inline XBRL is a structured data language that produces a single document readable by both people and software, per SEC.gov (2024) — meaning the compensation figures in a compliant proxy are not just printed text but tagged data you (or a tool) can extract programmatically and verify against the Summary Compensation Table numbers in the same filing.

A related but separate disclosure, the CEO Pay Ratio rule under Item 402(u) of Regulation S-K, was adopted August 5, 2015 under Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act and requires annual disclosure comparing CEO total compensation to median employee total compensation, per the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2015). Together, these two rules mean a current-year proxy statement carries more structured, cross-checkable compensation detail than it did a decade ago — useful context if you are trying to judge whether a number you found sits near the broader market. For scale, median S&P 500 CEO total compensation was $17.1 million in 2024, up 9.7% year over year, per the Equilar/Associated Press CEO Pay Study (2025) — a useful anchor for gauging whether a single company's disclosed figure is unusually high or low, though it says nothing about your specific peer set.

What a Single Filing Can't Tell You (and What a Peer Set Can)

A single DEF 14A tells you what one board decided for one executive in one year. It does not tell you whether that figure sits at the 25th percentile or the 90th percentile of comparable companies, and pulling that context by hand means repeating this entire lookup process across every company in a defensible peer group, then aligning fiscal years and pay components by hand.

That comparative step is what CEOSalary is built to do: it parses DEF 14A Summary Compensation Tables directly from EDGAR, cross-validates the figures against each company's Pay Versus Performance and CEO Pay Ratio XBRL data, and positions a benchmarked figure against a peer group built by revenue, sector, and ownership type — with every number tracing back to its filing. If you would rather learn the full mechanics of reading a proxy statement start to finish before you build that peer view yourself, our guide to reading a DEF 14A proxy statement is the next step, and our Proxy Statement Reading Guide: Parsing a Peer's Summary Compensation Table walks through annotating a real peer company's table line by line so you can bring a sourced comparison, not a guess, into your next conversation.