Research Report | Sep 2024 |
Looking Ahead to Executive Pay Practices/Design in 2025
Timely data on how companies of all sizes and ownership types are approaching executive compensation and incentive plan design.
Pearl Meyer’s “Looking Ahead to Executive Pay Practices” is an annual, online survey and valuable compensation planning tool. This year, it has been separated into two separate surveys, with the first “Practices/Design” survey focused primarily on compensation philosophy and plan design. (The second “Pay Projections” survey is focused on 2024 year-end and 2025 pay projections and data will be available later in the fall.)
This year’s plan design survey was conducted in August of 2024, with total participation from 211 companies, including 93 publicly traded, 88 private for-profit, and 30 not-for-profit (NFP) organizations. As with prior surveys, responses are broken out separately by respondent role (board member vs. employee), ownership type, industry, and company size.
The plan design survey addresses key topics associated with the current environment, including factors impacting peer group development, the expanding role for compensation committees with broader human capital oversight, actions taken to address incentive plan goal-setting challenges, and the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on financial results and executive compensation plan designs. It also covers subjects such as compensation philosophy, recent or anticipated incentive plan design changes, and long-term incentive award prevalence and participation.
