‘High pay day’ falls a bit later this year – but FTSE bosses need not fear | Nils Pratley

Use of data from Covid-hit 2020 has CEO pay looking lower than usual, but don’t expect it to last

It’s the first week of January, so it must be time for “high pay day”, the High Pay Centre’s illuminating calculation of the moment at which the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company will have been paid as much as the average UK worker will earn in the entire year. The imaginary gong will strike at about 9am on Friday morning.

That, notably, is slightly later than normal because the thinktank has to use backward-looking data for its exercise and, relatively speaking (a crucial qualification), the FTSE 100 crew had a lean time during the first pandemic year. In 2020, their average pay fell from £3.25m to £2.7m. That was still about 86 times the median earnings of a full-time UK worker but represented a multi-year low ratio-wise.

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