CEO salary UK 2026: what do Chief Executives actually earn?

How much do UK CEOs earn in 2026? The headline numbers

The most reliable figures for top-end CEO pay UK numbers come from two annual analyses, the High Pay Centre’s review of FTSE 100 pay and Deloitte’s executive remuneration research, and they broadly agree on the picture for 2025. Deloitte’s March 2026 analysis put the median FTSE 100 CEO total pay package at around £5.89 million in 2025, up 18% from £5.01 million in 2024. The High Pay Centre’s Fair Reward Framework review, published a month later, gave a slightly higher figure of £6.02 million for 2025, against £4.53 million in 2023, a 33% rise over the three-year period. The two figures use slightly different sample bases and methodologies, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: pay rose materially in 2025, after several years of much slower movement.

Those numbers are the ones that make headlines, the ones the Guardian and the BBC cite each year, and the ones the High Pay Centre uses for its annual “Fat Cat Day” calculations, when the average FTSE 100 chief executive’s pay overtakes the typical worker’s annual salary in less than three days of January. They’re accurate, they’re up to date, and they’re an excellent anchor for any conversation about executive pay in the UK, but they tell you very little about what most CEOs actually earn, because the FTSE 100 is, by any reasonable definition, a tiny and unrepresentative slice of the UK’s executive market.

The UK has fewer than 100 FTSE 100 CEOs at any given time, by definition, and another 250 CEOs running FTSE 250 companies, but it has tens of thousands of chief executives running private companies, mid-market businesses, owner-managed firms, charities, and public-sector organisations. Their pay looks nothing like the £6 million headline. To talk sensibly about CEO pay in the UK, you need to disaggregate.

Average vs median: why the headline CEO salary number is misleading

The first thing worth understanding, before you read any number reported as an average CEO salary UK figure, is that the average and the median give you very different stories, and which one a research organisation uses changes the headline figure significantly. Glass Lewis, in its early-2026 analysis, found that average total remuneration for FTSE 100 CEOs rose by nearly 25% in 2025, while the median rose by a more modest 18%, and that gap reflects the role of a small number of outsized packages, including LTIP awards that vest in lumpy years, in pulling the average above the median. The median, the pay of the CEO sitting exactly in the middle of the FTSE 100 by total reward, is the more useful representative figure for benchmarking, which is why the High Pay Centre, Deloitte, and most credible UK pay-research organisations report the median rather than the mean.

Beyond the FTSE 100, the picture changes again. Aggregator sites like Glassdoor and Payscale will tell you the “average chief executive officer salary in the UK” is roughly £100,000 to £140,000, and on a self-reported basis across all sizes of company that’s broadly accurate, but it’s also so broad as to be misleading. Lumping the CEO of a regional services business in with the chief executive of a FTSE 250 listed company gives you a number that doesn’t describe either of them, and the only honest way to think about CEO pay is to break it down by company size, sector, and ownership structure.

Insight: The median FTSE 100 CEO earns in a fortnight what the median UK full-time worker earns in a year. That’s not a metaphor, it’s the literal arithmetic of the High Pay Centre’s 2026 analysis, and it’s the central tension in every UK conversation about executive pay.

CEO salary by company size and stage

The realistic ranges for UK CEO total compensation, drawn from what we see day to day in our headhunting practice across UK industry, look broadly like this in 2026:

FTSE 100 CEO: £4 million to £18 million in total compensation in a typical year, with the median around £5.9 to £6 million in 2025, heavily weighted toward LTIPs and annual bonuses. Base salaries tend to sit between £900,000 and £1.4 million, with the rest coming from bonus, share awards, pension, and benefits. The very largest packages, often in oil and gas, banking, or pharmaceuticals, can run materially higher in years where LTIPs vest at maximum, with AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot the highest-paid in 2025 at £17.7 million.

FTSE 250 CEO: £750,000 to £2 million in total compensation, with the median typically between £1 million and £1.3 million. Base salaries usually sit between £400,000 and £700,000, with the rest in variable pay. There’s significant sector variation, and FTSE 250 chief executives in financial services, technology, and pharmaceuticals tend to be paid more than those in retail, leisure, or industrials.

Large private and PE-backed company CEO (£100m to £1bn revenue): £400,000 to £1.2 million, depending heavily on equity arrangements. Many of these CEOs hold meaningful equity stakes that, on exit, can deliver multiples of their cash compensation, which makes the cash number alone a poor measure of total reward. PE-backed CEOs in particular are often paid relatively modestly in cash, with the upside concentrated in the equity rollover at the next transaction.

Mid-market private company CEO (£20m to £100m revenue): £200,000 to £600,000 in total cash compensation, plus equity in many cases. Owner-managed businesses at this size often pay the chief executive less in cash than a corporate equivalent would, and compensate through profit share or a future exit.

SME CEO (under £20m revenue): £80,000 to £200,000 in most cases, with a long tail in either direction. Owner-CEOs of small businesses frequently take a relatively low salary and draw the rest as dividends, and the headline cash figure can understate true total reward materially.

These ranges aren’t strict limits, and any individual CEO might sit well outside them depending on sector, ownership structure, performance, and the negotiation history of their appointment. But they’re a more honest starting point than any single “average CEO salary UK” figure you’ll find in an aggregator, because they reflect the structure of the actual UK market, rather than a flat average across companies that have nothing in common except a CEO title.

How CEO pay is actually structured

A great deal of what gets reported in the press as a CEO’s “salary” isn’t salary at all, in the strict sense, and understanding the structure matters because the structure is where most of the money sits, and where the largest single difference exists between executive pay and ordinary employment. A typical FTSE 100 CEO total reward package has five components.

Base salary is the fixed cash element, usually paid monthly. For FTSE 100 CEOs, this is typically £900,000 to £1.4 million, and it tends to be the smallest component of the total package by some distance. Boards have, over the past decade, deliberately kept base salaries close to flat in nominal terms, while letting variable pay grow, partly to align pay with performance and partly because increases in base salary attract the most political and shareholder scrutiny.

Annual bonus is paid in cash, usually subject to performance against a set of financial and non-financial targets agreed with the remuneration committee at the start of the year. For a FTSE 100 CEO, an on-target bonus is typically 100-150% of base salary, with maximums in the range of 200% for outstanding performance.

Long-term incentive plans (LTIPs) are share-based awards that vest, typically over three years, against performance conditions such as total shareholder return, earnings per share growth, or strategic milestones. For most FTSE 100 CEOs, the LTIP is by some distance the largest component of total pay, and the volatility of LTIP outcomes is what makes year-on-year reported pay numbers so noisy. A CEO whose LTIP vests at maximum in a given year can show reported pay several million pounds higher than the same CEO would in a year where the LTIP vests at threshold, despite no change in the underlying contractual entitlement.

Pension contributions were historically a significant component, with some CEOs receiving employer contributions of 25% of base salary or more, but recent governance reforms have pushed FTSE 100 pension contributions down toward the workforce average, typically 10-15% of base salary in 2026.

Benefits make up a small but consistent portion, typically including private medical insurance, life assurance, a company car or allowance, and in some cases tax advice and personal security arrangements.

Note: What gets reported in the annual “single figure” of CEO pay, the number you see in the press, is the sum of all five components, including the value of LTIPs vesting in that year. That’s why two years of pay for the same CEO can vary by millions of pounds without anything material changing in their contract, and it’s why year-on-year comparisons of headline CEO pay numbers should always be read with the LTIP cycle in mind.

CEO pay in the UK charity sector

The UK charity sector operates by a different set of rules around charity CEO salary, both legally and culturally, and there’s a sustained level of public interest in what charity CEOs earn that you don’t see for most private-sector executives. The headline numbers, drawn from the Charity Finance research published in March 2025 and reported by Civil Society magazine, are these: the median chief executive salary at the UK’s largest 100 charities rose to £192,000 in the most recent reporting cycle, up from previous levels and continuing a steady upward trend, while the chief executives of the very largest organisations, including Cancer Research UK, the British Red Cross, Save the Children, and the National Trust, typically earn in the £200,000 to £350,000 range, with a small number, usually those running large healthcare-adjacent charities, crossing higher.

The reason charity CEO pay attracts disproportionate scrutiny, and ranks for genuinely high search volumes around named individuals like the chief executive of Cancer Research UK, is straightforward. Charities are funded, in significant part, by public donations, and the public has a legitimate interest in how those donations are spent, including on senior staff. The disclosure rules reflect that. Every UK charity with annual income above £500,000 is required to publish, in its annual report and accounts, the number of staff earning over £60,000 in £10,000 bands, and the very largest charities publish detailed remuneration disclosures comparable to listed companies.

The Charity Commission, Civil Society magazine, and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations all publish regular research on charity executive pay, and the picture they describe is nuanced. The very largest charities, with budgets of hundreds of millions of pounds, pay their chief executives at levels that look low compared to private-sector equivalents but high compared to what most donors expect, and that tension drives much of the public conversation. A CEO running a £400 million charity with thousands of staff is, by any operational measure, doing a comparable job to a mid-sized private-sector CEO, and the relative pay gap is one of the most striking features of the sector.

For candidates considering a move into charity leadership from the private sector, the cash compensation drop is real, and substantial, and is the single biggest practical factor most candidates have to weigh. Charity chief executive roles are rarely, if ever, the right move for someone whose primary objective is income.

The highest-paid CEO UK 2026: the top earners

The highest paid CEO UK in 2025 was, by a very wide margin, Denise Coates, the founder and co-chief executive of Bet365, who received roughly £280-287 million in combined salary and dividends in the year to March 2025, including a salary of £104 million and substantial dividends as the company’s majority shareholder. The Guardian, the BBC, and Bloomberg all reported the figure independently, drawing on Bet365’s filings at Companies House. Coates isn’t a FTSE 100 chief executive, and Bet365 isn’t a listed company, but her total annual pay package has, for several consecutive years, exceeded that of every UK listed company chief executive combined with most of the rest of them.

Behind Coates, the highest-paid CEO running a FTSE 100 company in 2025 was Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, who received total pay of £17.7 million, a 6.4% rise from £16.6 million in 2024, comprising base salary, annual bonus, and share grants. Other FTSE 100 chief executives consistently in the top tier include those running Shell, BP, HSBC, and Diageo, with annual total compensation typically in the £8 to £15 million range, although the exact ordering shifts year to year as LTIPs vest.

These names matter less than the structural pattern they illustrate. Outside one or two outliers driven by founder-shareholder economics, the UK’s highest-paid CEOs run very large global businesses in pharmaceuticals, energy, financial services, or consumer goods, and their pay is dominated by long-term share-based awards rather than cash. The pattern is consistent across the UK and US listed-company markets, although US executive pay sits roughly two to three times higher across equivalent business sizes.

The CEO-to-worker pay ratio: 100:1 in 2026

One of the most-discussed features of UK CEO pay is the ratio between chief executive total compensation and median worker pay at the same company. UK-listed companies have been required, since 2019, to publish this ratio annually, and the High Pay Centre’s analysis of the disclosed figures gives the most reliable picture. In 2025, the median CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio inside the FTSE 100 was 100:1, up from 93:1 in 2023, meaning the median FTSE 100 chief executive earned a hundred times what the median employee at the same companies earned.

Sector matters a great deal here. Companies in industries with large numbers of relatively low-paid workers, including retail, hospitality, and outsourcing, tend to show the largest ratios, with the highest published FTSE 100 ratios sitting above 400:1. Companies in financial services, professional services, or technology, where the median worker is itself well-paid, show much lower ratios, sometimes below 50:1. The headline number is therefore a function of business model as well as executive pay, and it isn’t a clean read on whether a company’s CEO is “overpaid” in any reasonable sense.

The pay-ratio disclosure rules also reveal something else, which is the slow pace of change in UK corporate governance practice. The High Pay Centre’s most recent analysis found that no FTSE 100 company appointed a worker director in any year between 2023 and 2025, and disclosure of how workers are consulted on executive pay rose from 7% in 2024 to only 12% in 2025. Reform of executive pay practice, on the evidence of the disclosure data, is happening slowly, and from a low base.

What’s driving CEO pay rises in 2026

Three structural factors are pushing UK CEO pay upward in 2026, and understanding them is the difference between treating annual pay-rise headlines as outrage stories and reading them as signals about how the executive labour market is actually moving.

The first is transatlantic competition for senior talent. UK-listed companies, particularly those with material US operations or US shareholder bases, have argued for several years that they can’t recruit or retain world-class chief executives at UK pay levels when US listed-company pay is several multiples higher. That argument has, in 2024 and 2025, translated into pay-policy reforms at multiple FTSE 100 companies, with shareholders supporting increases that would have been politically impossible a decade ago.

The second is share-price recovery and LTIP vesting. After a period of relatively modest LTIP outcomes during 2020-2022, the share-price recoveries of 2023 and 2024 have produced larger LTIP vests for many CEOs in 2024/25 reporting cycles. Because LTIPs are typically the largest single component of FTSE 100 CEO pay, a single good year for the underlying share price translates directly into a larger reported single figure.

The third is broader inflation in executive labour markets. Annual base salary increases of 3-5% across executive roles, combined with bonus opportunity ranges that have widened slightly over the past decade, have a compounding effect at the top of the market. Remuneration committees aren’t deciding to make a single dramatic change in most cases, they’re approving incremental movements that, year on year, accumulate into the rises that show up in the annual headline numbers.

For boards setting executive pay in 2026, the central question isn’t really whether to increase CEO pay against historical UK benchmarks, because they’re doing exactly that, but how to defend those increases in front of shareholders, employees, and the public, in a year where political attention on executive reward is, if anything, intensifying.

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If you’re a board setting C-suite remuneration, or an executive benchmarking your own package against the wider UK market, our team works with companies and candidates across UK industry on chief executive and board-level appointments. You can explore our executive search practice or get in touch through our executive opportunities page.