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Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Yes.

In 2023, the average S&P 500 CEO earned $17.1 million in total compensation compared with $63,800 earned by the average worker in an S&P 500 company. For the CEO that works out to $46,849 a day.

Because average compensation rates include extreme outliers, it’s notable that median pay differences between CEOs and workers in 2023 also yielded similar results. 

The median S&P 500 CEO earned $16.3 million in 2023 while the median worker for those companies earned around $81,400. Outliers notwithstanding, CEOs still earned their workers’ annual pay in a little less than two days.

This phenomenon continued in 2024 as the median S&P 500 CEO pay jumped nearly 10% and worker compensation increased by less than 1.05%.

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Sreejita Patra joined Wisconsin Watch as a statehouse reporting intern in June 2025. She is currently pursuing a journalism major at UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she is a rising junior. Sreejita works for Madison's student newspaper The Daily Cardinal and freelances for various Madison-based newspapers. She hopes to one day pursue investigative or features reporting, particularly on the South Asian diaspora.