XBRL-Tagged Executive Compensation Data: What's Machine-Readable

You pulled the filing expecting a dataset. You got a document.

A CFO preparing for a comp-committee renewal downloads the company's latest proxy statement expecting to extract pay figures the way she'd extract financial statement line items — structured, taggable, ready to drop into a spreadsheet. She finds part of what she needs behaves that way. The rest is a formatted HTML table she has to read, copy, and re-key by hand. That split isn't a filing error. It's how SEC executive compensation disclosure actually works: some of it is built to be machine-read, and some of it is still, functionally, a printed page. Knowing which is which determines whether you're extracting data or transcribing it — and it shapes how confidently you can build a benchmarking case before you sit down across from a board. By the end of this piece, you'll know exactly which executive pay disclosures carry structured tags today and which ones still require reading the document itself.

Why the format of the data matters as much as the number

Every figure in a proxy statement originates from the same event — a board approving pay for its named executive officers — but the SEC doesn't require every figure to be filed the same way. Some disclosures are wrapped in Inline XBRL, a structured data language that produces a single document readable by both a person and a machine, per SEC.gov (2024). Others are simply formatted text and tables inside the proxy's HTML, human-readable only. For anyone trying to assemble xbrl tagged executive compensation data into a peer set or a negotiation file, that distinction is the first thing to sort out — before you trust that a number can be pulled programmatically at all.

Pay Versus Performance: the disclosure built for machines

The clearest example of xbrl tagged executive compensation data is Pay Versus Performance. Item 402(v) of Regulation S-K, adopted August 25, 2022 and effective for 2023 proxies, mandates Inline XBRL tagging for this table, per Mintz (2022). That means the figures linking a company's reported executive pay to its actual financial performance — total shareholder return, net income, and company-selected performance measures alongside a compensation-actually-paid figure — are filed in a format a script can parse directly from EDGAR, not just a format a person can read on screen.

One detail matters for anyone hunting for this data in the wrong place: Pay Versus Performance is required in the proxy or information statement itself, not in the Form 10-K, per Greenberg Traurig (2023). If you're searching an annual report for the tagged pay data, you're searching the wrong filing. The proxy is where the structured numbers live. Our guide to pay-versus-performance disclosure walks through what each tagged data point in that table actually measures and how it differs from the Summary Compensation Table figure most people quote.

CEO Pay Ratio: mandated, but check the tagging

CEO Pay Ratio disclosure is a separate requirement with a separate history. Item 402(u) of Regulation S-K was adopted August 5, 2015 under Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, requiring companies to annually disclose the ratio of CEO total compensation to median-employee total compensation, per the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2015). That ratio is now a fixture of every large public company's proxy.

What isn't settled by the same source is whether pay ratio figures carry the identical Inline XBRL tagging mandate that governs Pay Versus Performance. Treat that as an open question worth confirming directly against the filing rather than assuming consistency across disclosures — the safest move is to check the specific proxy's XBRL viewer on EDGAR, which SEC.gov (2025) notes provides free public access to filings, before you build a script that assumes the ratio is structured data. Our explainer on CEO pay ratio disclosure covers what the ratio measures, who reports it, and where it typically sits in the filing.

The Summary Compensation Table: still a document, not a dataset

Here's the divide that catches most people building their own benchmarking file: the Summary Compensation Table — the core disclosure listing base salary, bonus, stock awards, and total compensation for a company's named executive officers — is not treated in current disclosure practice the way Pay Versus Performance is. 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). But this is the table most people mean when they ask where CEO salary data comes from, and it's the one still bound to the format of the document itself — read as a formatted table inside the HTML proxy rather than extracted as a structured field the way Pay Versus Performance data can be.

The number people usually want first — total CEO compensation — sits in the table that's hardest to pull programmatically, not the one built to be machine-read.

That's a meaningful constraint if you're trying to reproduce, say, the finding that 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 (2025). That figure comes from Summary Compensation Table data across hundreds of filings — compiled and standardized by the firms that publish it, not pulled directly from a structured XBRL field the way a Pay Versus Performance figure could be. Long-term incentives, chiefly performance equity, remain the primary driver of that total, per the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2026), which is part of why the components underlying the total are worth reading closely rather than taking the headline number at face value. Our guide to the Summary Compensation Table breaks down each column and what it does and doesn't tell you about realized versus reported pay.

What this divide means for building a defensible case

None of this changes what a proxy discloses — it changes how much work it takes to use it. A structured Pay Versus Performance figure can be pulled, checked, and cited with a filing date attached in a fraction of the time it takes to read, verify, and transcribe a Summary Compensation Table by hand across a peer set of a dozen companies. If you're building your own comparison ahead of a renewal or an offer, expect the tagged disclosures to move faster and the narrative tables to take longer — and budget your prep time accordingly rather than assuming every figure in the proxy is equally easy to extract.

This is also the exact seam where sourcing discipline matters most. A number pulled from a structured field still needs its filing and fiscal year named when you cite it. A number transcribed from an HTML table needs the same. The format changes the effort required to get the figure; it doesn't change the obligation to show where the figure came from when you bring it into a negotiation.

Reading both layers before you walk into the room

Treating a proxy as a single document misses the point: it's two layers of disclosure with two different levels of accessibility, filed together but built for different readers — one for a person scanning a table, one for a machine indexing structured tags. Understanding which of your target figures sit in each layer is the first step to building a peer set you can actually defend, whether you're comparing yourself to a Russell 3000 cohort or a single named company ahead of a scheduled review.

If you'd rather not reconcile the tagged and untagged layers of a proxy by hand, the Proxy Disclosure Decoder: Pay Ratio & Pay-Versus-Performance Reader walks through both Item 402(u) and Item 402(v) disclosures line by line, showing exactly what's structured and what still requires a close read. And if you're weighing that against a full benchmarking build, pricing lays out what a percentile-positioned, source-cited comparison looks like once the extraction work is done for you.