CEOs at America’s 100 largest low-wage employers are paid 632 times more than the average worker, study finds

Key findings

Case studies: stark examples

The wider context

Legislative action

Nick Lichtenberg is Fortune Intelligence editor and was formerly Fortune's executive editor of global news.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies reveals that executive compensation at the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers—dubbed the “Low-Wage 100”—has reached unprecedented heights, with CEOs taking home astronomical pay packages while typical workers’ wages stagnate or even decline. This annual “Executive Excess” analysis scrutinizes six years of pay and investment trends at major publicly traded companies, including household names like Starbucks, Walmart, Home Depot, and Amazon.

The CEO-worker pay gap is an issue beyond the Low-Wage 100. Among a broad sample of 50 public companies with revenues over $1 billion, a March 2025 study from Compensation Advisory Partners found a widening split between actual company performance and CEO pay. Median revenue growth collapsed on a year-over-year basis from 3.7% to 1.6% and earnings per share growth dropped from 0.3 to basically zero among the 50 firms, but the companies still issued bumper bonuses to their leaders. The significant boosts averaged a whopping 280% increase, and bonuses were still up

Two leading academics, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz and Greg Nagel, argued in the pages of Fortune in April that the data is daming. Back in 1965, CEOs earned 21 times more than the average worker;

It’s part of a wider story of wealth inequality, certainly in the United States, where the Congressional Budget Office found in late 2024 that the top 10% wealthiest Americans own the majority of assets, and the top 1% controls nearly a third.

There’s a bit of a “perfect storm” in the confluence of shareholder primacy, stock buybacks, and falling corporate tax rates

The IPS report catalogs a sweeping set of reforms already on the legislative agenda in Congress and in cities such as Portland and San Francisco. Proposals range from taxes and contract restrictions for excessive CEO-worker pay gaps to strengthening board accountability, corporate transparency, and shareholder powers. Many measures have drawn strong bipartisan as well as public support.

Ultimately, the Institute for Policy Studies warns that without decisive reform, America’s largest corporations will regret this. The report cited Drew Hambly, the investment director at the country’s largest public penson fund CalPERS, warning of the harmful effects of this imbalance at an SEC roundtable on executive compensation. CalPERS research, he said, finds high levels of worker unrest at low-wage corporations where median worker pay has either remained flat or declined over the past five years. “I want corporate boards to think more about the bottom 50% of people who work for them,” he told the roundtable. “Because when I go into a business, I’m probably interacting with a lower-wage worker. And if you’re going to drive value over time, that’s the face of your company.”

Starbucks, Lowe’s and Ulta Beauty did not respond to requests for comment.

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.