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. hit their highest level in four years, reaching an average of $4.18 for one gallon.

“Food and gas prices [are] soaring, and 48% of the world is living in poverty,” Stottlemyer says. “And while workers face that exceptional hardship, the CEOs of the world’s largest corporations have never had it so good.”

Workers are more productive, but have less to show for it

It’s not only company executives who have seen these benefits. Billionaires in general have been getting richer. 

In 2025, total billionaire wealth grew by $126,000 per second, the analysis found. Already in 2026, billionaires are collectively $4 trillion richer than they were 12 months ago. 

One of the major ways billionaires make this money is through dividends from the companies they are invested in. Companies paid out $79 billion in dividends to billionaires in 2025 alone—equal to $2,500 every second. 

On average, Oxfam says, billionaires make more money from dividends in under two hours than the average worker earns over a year. 

Workers generate this economic value, Stottlemyer notes. But they’re taking home less and less of the value that they create.

“What we’re seeing in this data is that workers have gotten more productive. They’re generating more wealth, but they have less to show for it,” she says.

(The increase in productivity couldn’t be attributed to one thing like the explosion of AI, Stottlemyer notes).

Workers today essentially create 51% more economic value as compared to 2004, the analysis found, but they receive 2% less share of that income. 

‘A rigged economic system’

With wealth also comes power, and billionaires have been flexing that power, particularly around politics. 

Oxfam estimates that billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people—and in many cases, those wealthy politicians have cut taxes for the rich or looked to undermine workers’ rights.

The ultra-wealthy also shape public discourse through media outlets, like Jeff Bezos’s overhaul of the Washington Post’s opinion section, or how fossil fuel billionaire Vincent Bolloré took over the French television channel CNews and turned it into what some have called “the Fox News of France.”

Companies can also suppress worker power, whether through union busting or other workplace behaviors.

“The explosion of riches at the very top is emblematic of a rigged economic system that’s designed to benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of working families,” Stottlemyer says. 

Meanwhile, gaps in labor policy exacerbate these issues. The U.S. federal minimum wage, in just one example, has been stagnant at $7.25 an hour for nearly 17 years. (House Democrats just recently introduced legislation to raise that minimum wage to $25 an hour.)

Federal minimum wage reform is just one tool that would help workers. ITUC and Oxfam also call for governments to enact higher taxes on the rich and limits on CEO pay.

If the numbers in this analysis seem shocking, Stottlemyer says they “reflect the shocking levels of extreme inequality that people feel day to day in their lives.”

“Regular working people know very well that the system is not in their favor,” she adds.

This May Day—which celebrates the history of labor organizing around the world—she hopes workers remember that they do have power to change their conditions. 

“It reminds us of all the ways that organized labor and labor in general has come together across history to fight for a more fair system,” she says. “I hope folks remember that workers have the power to bring about a more equal world.”

Disclosure: Mansueto Ventures newsrooms Fast Company and Inc. are represented by the Writers Guild of America, East.

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