David O'Neil

Executive compensation is a combination of the cash and non-cash pay that an executive-level employee receives. Unlike the contracts for lower-level employee compensation, contracts for executive compensation tend to have an explicit breakdown of their pay package, including:

• Base salary
• Short-term incentives
• Long-term incentives, like stock and option awards
• Non-qualified deferred compensation
• Perquisites, like use of a company car or country club membership

The details of the pay package, including prevalence of each component, scale of each component and metrics for incentive plans, are negotiated each year. Executive compensation is often trickier to evaluate than those for a non-executive role, since an executive job is not necessarily tied to a preexisting paygrade. ERI’s Assessor Platform can help price an executive job title with access to our database of proxy statements and salary survey data.

A proxy statement is a document that all publicly traded companies on the United States stock exchange are required to file annually. Internationally, companies are required to file Canadian Information Circulars, EU/UK Annual Reports, etc., depending on the company’s location. These documents are required to be sent out before a shareholder meeting to give shareholders insight into how the company is performing, as well as plans for how the company will be focused and managed in the upcoming year.

These disclosures include proposed compensation for directors and the top five executives, potential conflicts of interest, potential new board members, and any other issues that the shareholders will vote on during the meeting.

Disclosures are a great way to find executive compensation for publicly traded companies. The Summary Compensation table displayed in proxy statements includes data for Salary, Bonus, Stock Awards, Option Awards, Non-equity Incentive Plan Compensation, Pension and Nonqualified Deferred Compensation (NQDC) Earnings, All Other Compensation, and Total Compensation for the top five named executive officers (NEOs) in an organization. ERI gathers data from these proxy statements, as well as from salary surveys, and displays the executive compensation data for the latest year on executive data pages, like this one. ERI’s database has data from proxy statements going back to the year 2000 to help compensation professionals price executive compensation packages. To benchmark total compensation for executives, we recommend subscribing to ERI’s Assessor Platform. You can request a quote here.

These disclosures include proposed compensation for directors and the top five executives, potential conflicts of interest, potential new board members, and any other issues that the shareholders will vote on during the meeting.