With nearly one in five S&P 500 companies cutting executive pay in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CEO compensation remains a topic of significant ESG attention. While we wait to see if the pandemic pay cuts have any long-term impact on executive compensation in 2020 and beyond, we do know that CEO pay in 2019 continued to set records in the S&P 500, as indicated by the 482 proxies filed as of May 12, 2020. Using our CompanyIQ^® SEC EDGAR search tool, we extracted all components of S&P 500 CEO pay packages in proxy filings to bring you this report.

Following the trend from recent years, stock awards again make up the vast majority of CEO total compensation. The chart below shows the overall spend by component among the S&P 500 companies. As expected, the lowest spend is in all other compensation.