Top CEO pay increased 20 times faster than workers’ pay in 2025: report

With gas prices, energy bills, and grocery costs all rising, the affordability crisis is top of mind for most workers. But you can’t talk about that crisis without also talking about extreme wealth inequality, says Patricia Stottlemyer, policy lead for labor rights at Oxfam America. And just as affordability has worsened recently, so has the gap between regular workers and the rich, including company CEOs. In 2025, for example, the top 1,500 CEOs of the world’s largest corporations saw an 11% real-terms pay raise. The average global worker, on the other hand, saw their real wages increase by only 0.5%. That means those CEOs saw their pay increase 20 times faster than workers last year. In the United States specifically, CEO pay grew 20.4 times faster than workers’ wages, an increase of 25.6% compared to just 1.3%. The data comes from a new analysis by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Oxfam, which highlights the ways workers are being left behind; the analysis is tied to International Workers’ Day, also called May Day. ‘CEOs have never had it so good’ The average CEO took home $8.4 million in both pay and bonuses in 2025, up from $7.6 million in 2024, according to the analysis. Look back even further, and the growth is even more stark. In 2019, the average CEO pay was $5.5 million, meaning there’s since been a 54% increase in real terms. Some executives rake in drastically more than that. The CEO of semiconductor company Broadcom received a 2025 pay package totaling $205.3 million; Microsoft’s CEO got $96 million. The real wages for workers around the world, however, have dropped 12% since 2019. “This data really puts some numbers behind what average working folks are feeling day to day,” Stottlemyer says. Between 2019 and 2025, food prices have increased by 15% and gasoline prices by 14%, when adjusted for inflation—and that’s not even including the recent price shocks from the conflict in Iran. On April 28, gas prices in the U.S. h