Your pay hasn't moved since 2008. FTSE 100 CEO pay just set its fourth record in a row.
Your pay hasn’t moved since 2008. FTSE 100 CEO pay just set its fourth record in a row.
By Luke Oliff | Jul 2026 | 5 min read
The median FTSE 100 chief executive was paid a record £5.06 million in 2025/26, which is 130 times the median UK full-time worker and the widest gap in eight years, according to the High Pay Centre’s annual report published this month. Over the same period real wages for everyone else have gone roughly nowhere: average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, are still around where they were before the 2008 financial crisis, leaving the typical worker about £11,000 a year worse off than if pre-crisis wage growth had simply continued. So everyone else got poorer, the richest got richer. Again.
The CEO numbers
The High Pay Centre’s annual report covers FTSE 100 CEO pay for the 2025/26 financial year.
Median CEO pay rose 8.6%, from £4.66 million to £5.06 million. That’s the fourth consecutive year of growth and each of those four years set a new record. The ratio against the median UK full-time worker went from 124:1 to 130:1, the widest in eight years. 66 companies, 70% of the index, increased their CEO’s package this year. FTSE 100 companies spent £550.4 million on their CEOs in total.
The growth came from incentive schemes. The mean long-term incentive payment rose 20% to £2.71 million and the mean short-term bonus rose 14% to £1.84 million.
Interim director Andrew Speke called the findings “a wake-up call to those who’ve turned a blind eye to rising executive pay”.
The wages numbers
House of Commons Library analysis of ONS data found real median pay for full-time employees in April 2025 was still 2% below its 2008 level. Real wages fell 6.7% after the financial crisis and spent a decade getting back to the start line. The Resolution Foundation puts earnings £11,000 a year below where they’d be if pre-2008 wage growth had continued. The TUC found pay worth less than in 2008 in nearly two-thirds of UK local authorities.
Anyone who entered the workforce after about 2005 has never worked through a period of sustained real pay growth in this country. Eighteen years is not a rough patch.
Two independent facts, one signal
To be clear about what I am not saying: CEO pay did not cause flat wages. The entire FTSE 100 CEO payroll spread across the UK workforce is about £22 a head. These are two independent facts.
Flat wages have a cause, and the cause is policy. Thirteen years of Conservative austerity: public sector pay freezes, cut investment, and the productivity stall that followed all of it. Then a Labour government that kept the fiscal rules and the spending restraint, which makes Starmer’s Labour, in my view, the first Labour leadership to run on austerity rather than against it.
Austerity was sold as necessity. There’s no money, wage demands are inflationary, everyone has to tighten. The CEO numbers are what make that pitch impossible to take at face value, because the same economy that couldn’t afford a real-terms pay rise for the median worker in eighteen years found 8.6% a year, four record years running, for the hundred people at the top of it. The money exists. Boards decide where their payroll goes, governments decide whose restraint is mandatory, and both keep making the same decision.
That’s the signal the two charts send when you put them side by side. It’s their priority.
The High Pay Centre’s proposed reforms are worth reading: full implementation of the Employment Rights Act, worker directors on boards, pay disclosure across the workforce rather than just the CEO’s single figure, and a corporation tax surcharge on packages above set multiples of the median wage.
FAQ
What is the CEO-worker pay gap in the UK in 2026? The median FTSE 100 CEO was paid 130 times the median UK full-time worker in 2025/26, up from 124:1 the year before and the widest ratio in eight years. Median CEO pay was a record £5.06 million, the fourth consecutive record year.
Have UK real wages really not grown since 2008? Yes. House of Commons Library analysis of ONS data found real median pay for full-time employees in April 2025 was still 2% below its 2008 level. The Resolution Foundation estimates workers are about £11,000 a year worse off than if pre-2008 wage growth had continued.
Did rising CEO pay cause flat wages? No. The two are independent: total FTSE 100 CEO pay is around £550 million, about £22 per UK worker. Flat wages track policy choices made since 2010, principally austerity-era pay restraint and reduced public investment.
What does the High Pay Centre recommend? Full implementation of the Employment Rights Act, worker-elected directors on company boards, corporate reporting rules that disclose pay across the workforce, and a corporation tax surcharge on executive packages exceeding set multiples of the median UK salary.
Tags: Pay Transparency, CEO Pay, FTSE100, United Kingdom
Sources: High Pay Centre Annual Report, House of Commons Library / ONS ASHE data, Resolution Foundation, TUC analysis