CEO pay is on the rise in 2025, and the pace of growth is leaving the average worker far behind, according to a new report.
The leaders of some of the world’s biggest companies got an 11% pay bump last year, while the average worker globally got a measly 0.5% increase. That means CEO pay grew roughly 20 times faster than that of the average worker, according to a Friday study published by the International Trade Union Confederation and Oxfam.
The report, which looked at 1,500 companies across 33 countries, found that the average CEO was paid about $8.4 million last year, up from an average of $5.5 million in 2019.
The poster child of high executive pay, though, may be Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In November, shareholders approved a pay package for the world’s richest man that could award him up to $1 trillion worth of stock over 10 years if he meets certain growth goals, including a requirement to grow Tesla’s market cap to $8.5 trillion, an increase of about 585%. The record-breaking pay package was valued at $158 billion in 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Billionaires did incredibly well last year, thanks in part to solid stock market gains in 2025. The S&P 500 increased by just under 18% in 2025. Nearly 1,000 billionaires whose investment portfolios were identified earned $79 billion in dividends last year, according to the report.
To be sure, the study compared the pay of 1,500 CEOs from “top-paying corporations” against the wages of all the workers in the world, conflating two seemingly unrelated groups. A fairer comparison could be measuring CEO pay against worker pay within those same companies, as commenters on the Economics subreddit pointed out.
The leap in CEO pay comes as wages for the average worker have plummeted. Global real wages for workers fell by 12% between 2019 and 2025. The report claims that given this decrease in wages, the average worker has worked 108 days for free since 2019.
Apart from falling wages, the average worker has had to deal with skyrocketing inflation in recent years. Core inflation saw an uptick of 0.3% and was 3.2% higher in March than a year earlier, according to the core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes volatile categories like food and energy. Since 2020, overall prices are up 25%, according to data from the consumer price index.
Federal Reserve data show that the wealth gap in the U.S. is growing. As of the third quarter of 2025, the top 1% of American households owned about 29% of the country’s wealth, compared to 5.3% owned by the bottom 50%.
To remedy this disparity, the government should take corrective action, Amitabh Behar, the executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement.
“Governments must cap CEO pay, fairly tax the super-rich, and ensure minimum wages at the very least keep pace with inflation and ensure a dignified living,” he said.
