The bosses of FTSE 100 companies will have made more money in 2026 before midday on Tuesday than the average worker will all year, according to figures laying bare the yawning income gap.
Median annual pay for FTSE 100 chief executives is £4.4m, the High Pay Centre thinktank calculated, 113 times higher than the £39,039 earned by the median full-time worker.
That means UK bosses will exceed the average annual pay of staff in less than 29 hours of work, or by about 11.30am on Tuesday if they started work on Friday 2 January.
The median salary for FTSE 100 chief executives equates to £1,353.23 an hour, or nearly £23 a minute.
So, how are these people actually paid?
mostly thanks to long-term incentive plans.
So the payu is not for the 62.5 hours work a week this year, is it?
“They lie, of course””Just shut up, you! I’ve got a point to make and it’s vital that my socialist readers believe it! They don’t need facts from people like you!”
Median annual pay for FTSE 100 chief executives is £4.4m, the High Pay Centre thinktank calculated, 113 times higher than the £39,039 earned by the median full-time worker.
That means UK bosses will exceed the average annual pay of staff in less than 29 hours of work, or by about 11.30am on Tuesday if they started work on Friday 2 January.
And this affects me how? Why should I give a fat rat’s arse?
Obviously I believe that CEOs should be paid whatever their remuneration committees agree they’re worth.
Not everyone can run a big company, it’s demanding and it can consume your life.
However – and this is purely from a realpolitik viewpoint – I do wonder how this will end.
We live in the real but unreal world where perception and propaganda are ever more important, and the public ever less educated.
The United Healthcare chief exec really was murdered in public, and there’s a very good chance his killer (if that’s what he was) will be found not guilty by a jury of people who believe he was asking for it.
Across the west, lots of ordinary people are struggling – you only have to keep half an ear open in the pub.
In the UK< clearly a succession of governments which have landed us with close to £3 trillion in debt and servicing costs of £100+ bn pa, while the entire country goes to ratshit, are actually to blame.
But does anyone have any faith that a significant proportion of the public are going to understand that?
Yep, we should sack the electorate. Leave the voting to us and our cats.
Unfortunately our cats are dead so they’d vote Democrat.
The “High Pay Centre” calls itself a “thinktank”. That’s obviously a lie too.
Unless the “tank” is an allusion to their desire to see Red Army tanks on our streets.
They’re comparing UK full time workers with CEOs of companies which generate 3/4 of their sales abroad. What does the Hippy Centre want? A law making it compulsory for foreigners to benchmark their pay to a median UK earner, and how will it be enforced? Delta perhaps
Minimum wage should be £1353.23 an hour, obviously. Then we can all be equal.
The EU is fine with making laws for other countries to follow – if you’d stayed in you could too;)
Capitalists build. Communists destroy.
Their reason for pointing out exec pay is to stir ENVY. They aren’t going to do a damn thing for the ‘average worker.’ They want to destroy CEO pay. This will hurt the companies, hence, the workers, but that’s fine with High Pay Centre.
By mistakenly projecting their own decency on communists, people believe commies are for the workers. They are not. It’s “hurt the rich,” not “help the poor.”
Orwell did nail it in 1984:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.“
Close but they always end up with wealth and luxury too.
You project greed, Norman.
I’m simply observant, G. Name me a poor Marxist leader.
Emil/Orwell make an extremely important point. Your bringing up money is a crappy distraction.
That is a side-effect and not inevitable. The standard examples are Sulla and Robespierre – the latter ended up executed without trial by his fellow revolutionaries which may have led later revolutionaries to conclude that if the wages of sin are death and the wages of abstinence from self-enrichment are likewise death there is no point in abstinence. .
“will have made more money”
…and got paid some of it.
The clue is in the questions really. You get paid a bit of the money you make for the company. CEOs make lots and lots of money for the company by doing CEO stuff, or they get canned. Average worker makes bits and bobs of money for the company.
Possibly not understanding what that CEO value adding stuff is, means they dont value it. You could say the same with soccer where the wages are even higher. Soccer is basically ponsing about kicking a ball back to the goalie and falling over clutching your leg, isn’t it?
No doubt to be followed by claims that “all we have to do is tax billionaires ‘fairly’ and we’ll all live happily ever after”.
So I did 15 minutes research on this.
If the UK government had confiscated 100% of all the wealth of all the UK billionaires on 31st December 2025, they will have spent all the money by 6 p.m. on February 19th 2026.
According to Perplexity, between them the UK’s billionaires own between £182B and £312B. Let’s use £300B as a nice, round number.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/bbf8c502-e4ff-49c0-a2f7-afa964a8e000
But very little of it is cash: apart from a relatively tiny amount of bling it’s in the ownership of (i.e. control over) businesses that provide goods and services, generate consumer surplus, and employ people who pay tax; and ownership of buildings that provide accommodation and generate rent, on which they pay tax. They’re obviously pretty good at allocating these resources otherwise they wouldn’t still be billionaires: someone would have out-competed them and they’d have lost it.
Let’s speculate, probably be optimistic, and assume that 1% of their wealth is in liquid cash. That’s £3B. Enough to run the UK for rather less than half a day. And they already pay a significant percentage of that in various taxes.
To turn the rest of their assets into liquid redistributable cash you’d have to sell it, but those billionaires can no longer buy it because you’ve nicked all their wealth. So who can? The government by printing money but it could do that anyway, distribute it, and create inflation. The rest of the population between them? This requires them already to have the money to do it, so that’s not redistributive, is it? And they’re already using it for something else. So it would have to be furriners. Who pay tax elsewhere, not here, so the tax take goes down.
Or simply nationalise the lot, in which case you replace James Dyson, who created all the wealth he owns, with someone like Olly Robbins under the direction of Peter Kyle, men who have never run productive businesses. What is the likely future course of those businesses’ productivity, output, consumer surplus and tax contribution under such people? We don’t have to speculate: history tells us what happens, every time.
So by confiscating billionaires’ wealth the country ends up with a lot less of everything. Well done, chaps.
Wow. A dangerous line of reasoning. If the billionaires had say £17tn of wealth then we could confiscate the lot and run the government for 15 years, and the lefties would say what a good idea.
Rather than asking what makes such wealth, let’s copy that.
Labour made the FTSE 100 hot 10,000 for the first time. Wow.
I think you’ll find Trump has just done that.
That is because (i) the FTSE measures in depreciating “money of the day” and if you measured the FTSE 100 Index against an honest inflation indicator the number would be nearer 1,000 than 10,000 and (ii) Labour taxation and inflation policies incentivise savers to put their money in “real assets” rather than cash deposits – for a 40% taxpayer the tax on their interest income exceeds the real income (the debasement of the currency for the principal and the tax on the nominal interest jointly exceed the amount of the interest) so the price of gold, of owner-occupied homes and shares whose value is expected to grow (and to a lesser extent shares whose value is expected to remain constant) all rise in money terms even faster than inflation.
This always occurs (well, almost always – the 1931 crash and mass unemployment overwhelmed the normal impact of Labour governments on the Stock Exchange) for instance house prices rose more in ten years under Tony Blair than in the previous thousand years.
If you think the level of the FTSE Index matters more than the level of unemployment and the number of bankruptcies with the consequent misery then you should be writing for the Grauniad rather than reading Tim’s blog.
But the stock market going up is good news for pensions.
They wouldn’t have made so much in the first few days of this year if the market hadn’t gone up. So, the secret to ending inequality is to enact policies that will crush the market. Of course, that would also crush a lot pension plans and individual retirement accounts, but isn’t that a small price to pay to get a grip on high executive compensation? You don’t have this problem in places like Cuba.
If Lauren were offered one of those positions – without compensation – she would turn it down.
Companies put a lot of process in place to make sure a lowly employee can’t destroy the company in a few bad moments. The CEO however can often make or break the company in a moment.
Pay them proportionately well: their contribution matters massively more than anyone who is just a pair of hands.