Median pay for a FTSE 100 chief executive reached £5.06m in the financial year ending March 2026, an increase of 8.6% on the previous year's £4.66m, according to research from the High Pay Centre, a think tank that tracks executive remuneration. Set against a median full-time UK salary of about £39,000, that puts the ratio at 130:1, up from 124:1.

That is the widest the gap has been since it reached 137:1 in the year to the end of March 2018. The highest-paid FTSE 100 chief executive was Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca, at £17.7m.

Andrew Speke, the High Pay Centre's interim director, said the increase "should be a wake-up call," adding that "this is the fourth year in a row that FTSE 100 executive pay has risen, and this growth is starting to substantially outstrip growth in worker pay."

Why you will see several different numbers

Readers who follow this topic will have seen ratios ranging from roughly 100:1 to 130:1 attributed to the same organisation within the past year. The figures are not contradictory. They measure different things, and the differences are large enough to matter.

Three variables drive the spread:

Which worker you compare against. A ratio against the median full-time worker produces a different result from one against a 25th-percentile employee. The High Pay Centre's CEO Pay and Pay Ratio Briefing 2026, published in May, reported median CEO pay of £5.2m across a sample of 64 firms and a ratio of 127:1 against the 25th-percentile employee, a deliberately different comparator.

Whether pension is counted. The organisation's Fat Cat Day 2026 analysis, published in January, put median FTSE 100 CEO pay at £4.4m excluding pension, and the ratio at 113:1 against median full-time pay of £39,039. Excluding pension lowers both the headline figure and the ratio.

Which period and sample. The High Pay Centre's annual review covering 2024/25 reported median pay of £4.58m and a ratio of 122:1, against 123:1 the year before. Its Fair Reward Framework review tracked median FTSE 100 CEO pay rising 33% between 2023 and 2025, from £4.53m to £6.02m, with a median-to-median ratio moving from 93:1 to 100:1 on that sample.

The practical point for readers: a pay ratio is only meaningful alongside its definition. Comparisons across headlines, or across years where the methodology changed, will mislead. Within a single consistent series, the direction of travel is what carries information, and in each series the direction is upward.

What is driving the increase

Most FTSE 100 chief executive pay is not salary. The bulk arrives through long-term incentive plans, share awards that vest over several years against performance conditions. The incentive component is where this year's increase came from: the mean long-term incentive payment rose by about a fifth to £2.7m, and the mean short-term incentive payment rose 14% to £1.8m.

That structure means reported pay in any given year reflects share price and performance over a prior multi-year window rather than the last twelve months alone, which is part of why executive pay can rise in years when workers' real wages are flat.

Several large UK-listed companies have also moved to raise executive pay explicitly to compete with US-listed peers, where remuneration is substantially higher. That argument was made prominently during 2024 and 2025 by UK company boards and by the London Stock Exchange's own leadership, who framed restraint on executive pay as a factor in companies choosing to list in New York rather than London.

The argument on both sides

The case made by boards and business groups is a market one: the pool of people who have run a company of FTSE 100 scale is small, it is global, and US packages set the clearing price. On this view, capping UK pay risks losing executives and, over time, listings.

Critics, including the High Pay Centre, argue that the evidence for a genuine transatlantic bidding war is thinner than claimed, since most FTSE 100 chief executives are internal appointments rather than recruits poached from US firms, and that ratios of this size are difficult to justify on performance grounds when worker pay has grown far more slowly.

Both positions are contested and neither is settled by the pay data itself. What the data does establish is the direction and the scale: on the High Pay Centre's own consistent measure, the gap widened again this year, for the fourth consecutive year.