The CEOs of America's 100 largest low-wage corporations collected an average of $17.5 million in total compensation in 2025, more than double what their median employees could expect to earn over an entire lifetime, according to a new report.
The 32nd annual Executive Excess report from the Institute for Policy Studies zeroes in on the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker wages (the authors call them the "Low-Wage 100") and tracks trends in CEO compensation, worker pay, stock buybacks, and political lobbying activity.
The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio at Low-Wage 100 firms reached 614 to 1 in 2025, up from 574 to 1 in 2019, and far wider than the 312-to-1 average across the broader S&P 500 index (excluding Elon Musk's extraordinary compensation). In 1965, that ratio at major US corporations averaged just 25 to 1, according to the report.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna hauled in the single largest pay package among the group, collecting $38 million, which is 765 times as much as the company's $49,630 median pay. Lumentum, an AI data center technology manufacturer, recorded the widest pay gap: new CEO Michael Hurlston earned $27.7 million, a ratio of 2,884 to 1 against the company's median pay of $9,595.
Western Digital posted the lowest median wage of any firm in the group, at $8,740, reflecting the fact that approximately 88 percent of the company's 40,000 employees are based in Asia.
Between 2019 and 2025, average CEO compensation within the Low-Wage 100 climbed 41.4 percent in nominal terms or more than double the 20.7 percent nominal gain in median worker pay at those same firms during the same stretch.
US inflation over that period ran at 25.9 percent, meaning the typical worker at these corporations effectively took a real-terms pay cut even as their CEOs saw their packages swell. At 18 of the 100 firms, median pay actually declined in nominal terms over the six-year period.
The widening pay gap carries implications well beyond worker welfare. As InvestmentNews has reported, CEO pay ratios have increasingly drawn scrutiny from institutional investors, concerned about governance and long-term value creation. Separately, research has linked aggressive buyback programs to inflated executive pay and diminished shareholder returns over time.
The report argues that the mechanism connecting bloated CEO pay to stagnant worker wages is, in large part, the stock buyback.
Over the seven years from 2019 through 2025, Low-Wage 100 firms collectively spent $718 billion repurchasing their own shares; a sum that their executives and major shareholders captured largely as capital gains. In 2025 alone, those firms spent $108.6 billion on buybacks, up from $105 billion the prior year.
Stock-based compensation accounts for roughly 80 percent of CEO pay packages at large US corporations, according to the report, meaning buybacks directly inflate what executives take home.
An SEC investigation cited in the study found that top executives sell five times as much stock in the eight days following a buyback announcement as they do in the days before one.
Before 1982, US companies were legally barred from engaging in buybacks as a form of stock-price manipulation.
Lowe's, Walmart, and Home Depot were the biggest buyback spenders among the Low-Wage 100. Lowe's spent $46.8 billion repurchasing its own shares over the seven-year period — enough, by the report's calculation, to have paid each of its 276,000 employees an extra $24,235 every year.
Walmart, which ranked first in buyback spending in 2025 at $8.1 billion, could instead have funded a $3,851 bonus for each of its 2.1 million employees.
Doug McMillon, who stepped down as Walmart CEO on January 31, 2026, earned $29.2 million in 2025; 958 times the company's $30,520 median pay. His retirement package includes deferred compensation valued at $169 million.
At least 36 billionaires owe their wealth directly to Low-Wage 100 companies, with combined personal fortunes worth $946.6 billion, according to the report's analysis of Forbes data.
Walmart alone has produced eight living billionaires from the Walton family. DoorDash's 2020 IPO minted three billionaires among its co-founders. Estee Lauder has generated four.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune stood at approximately $254 billion as of July 2026, collected just $1.68 million in formal CEO compensation in 2025, nearly all of it for personal security, while his net worth grew by roughly $33 billion over the past year.
The report closes with a menu of proposed reforms. Polling cited by the authors found that 80 percent of likely voters support higher taxes on corporations that pay their CEO more than 50 times what they pay their median employees.
The report also argues that if Congress had set the stock buyback excise tax at 4 percent rather than 1 percent when it was introduced in 2022, the Low-Wage 100 would have owed approximately $9.3 billion in additional federal taxes on share repurchases over the 2023-2025 period.
A bipartisan provision in the pending Senate defense authorization bill would bar military contractors from engaging in stock buybacks.
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