CEO salaries zoom ahead of ordinary worker pay: ACSI ASX 200 chief executive pay survey
Only five ASX 200 chiefs didn’t get a bonus, the highest paid was a minnow and pay packets like Greg Goodman’s $135m and Chris Ellison’s $15m mean top CEOs now earn 55 times the average worker | SEE THE LIST
Business
Don't miss out on the headlines from Business. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Spare a thought for Tony Lombardo. The Lendlease chief executive was the only ASX 100 boss to score zero bonus, and one of five in the ASX 200 deprived of an incentive payment, according to industry super research house the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors.
It finds the nation’s most powerful chief executives earn 55 times that of the average worker in financial year 2024, up from 50. And, the cost of dumping a dud boss for poor performance or bad behaviour is getting cheaper as boards leverage changes to termination rules to punch holes in golden parachutes.
But the CEOs of Australia’s largest publicly listed companies still wield sizeable power and pay packets.
Median pay in the smaller end of the market is steadily catching up the blue-chips, and 137 out of 142 CEOs eligible for a bonus received at least a dollar (and up to $23.75m for Macquarie’s Shemara Wikramanayake).
The others to miss out were Credit Corp’s Tom Beregi, Elders’ Mark Allison, Corporate Travel Management’s Jamie Pherous and Karoon Energy’s Julian Fowles. For a third year in four, Car Group’s Cameron McIntyre received his maximim eligible bonus award.
The combination of a rocketing share price and equity incentives is supercharging the actual pay of some CEOs to hundreds of times that of an average worker, ACSI, which represents $1.9 trillion in funds under management, found.
A standout in these stakes is Greg Goodman from industrial property behemoth Goodman Group whose reported pay from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2024 was $58.29m, but whose actual or realised pay was substantially higher: $135.61m.
This discrepancy was primarily due to the rise in Goodman Group’s share price over that time, which increased the value of his equity incentives.
Slightly less well off but still showered in pay was Chris Ellison, the boss of scandal-ridden Mineral Resources. His realised pay was significantly higher due to the inclusion of vested equity, amounting to $14.75m.
This figure includes shares worth approximately $12.08m received upon the vesting of incentives in September 2023, according to ACSI. However, bringing his eye-watering windfall back down to earth was the actual value of these shares at May 2025 prices of around $4.35m.
Former boss of jewellery chain Lovisa, Victor Herrero, received the highest realised pay of the 150 CEOs in the sample (excluding foreign-based company CEOs) of $39.55m. His realised pay for 2024 was higher than that of the next five highest paid ASX 101-200 CEOs for that year combined.
This outlier effect skewed pay in the bottom half of the ASX 200, too. Among those smaller companies average pay was 31 times the average worker, up from 25. Excluding the former Lovisa boss’s weighty pay, the multiple was 26 times.
There is reason for shareholders to rejoice, too. Boards did manage to claw back some excessive termination payments, bonuses and golden parachutes enjoyed by CEOs in the exec pay golden era.
Termination payments for ASX 100 CEOs dropped to $8.38m in 2024, down from $33.52m the prior year.
This translates to an average of half a million dollars per CEO termination as the average farewell fell from $1.97m to $1.40m. This was partly due to fewer departures, but it also reflected a long-term trend that saw egregious payouts shrink following changes to the Corporations Act after the Global Financial Crisis.
“Together, Australian investors and boards have used the changes to termination payments laws in 2009 to drive down the cost of CEO departures,” said Ed John, ACSI’s executive manager for stewardship.
“Those changes have driven better accountability and avoided ‘golden parachutes’ which provide pay for failure to departing CEOs. This was a major issue in Australia, and we saw more than $80m of shareholders’s money paid to terminated CEOs in the year before the law changed.”
The ACSI research found that fixed pay and total realised pay (which includes fixed pay and bonuses received) for ASX 100 CEOs was largely flat over the past decade. Median realised pay for ASX 100 CEOs was $4.15m compared to $3.96m in 2014.
“While there will always be outliers, the long-term trends on fixed pay, realised pay and termination pay show that the diligence of Australian investors and boards are working. We have worked hard to avoid the eye-watering outcomes that we see in other markets like the US,” Mr John said.
More Coverage
Originally published as CEO salaries zoom ahead of ordinary worker pay: ACSI ASX 200 chief executive pay survey
Investors turn blind eye to Powell’s hawkish tone
As the Federal Reserve maintains a hawkish stance amid inflation concerns, investors should look beyond Wall Street for protection against looming economic headwinds.
Triple fatality crash from lack of oxygen entirely preventable
A Victorian aviation company knew its fire mapping Gulfstream wasn’t supplying reliable air to the pilot but kept it flying until it crashed, killing all on-board, the ATSB has found.