Wage growth for workers has stagnated while CEOs’ earnings continue to rise, according to a new report released Thursday from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation.
In the U.S., according to Oxfam, CEO pay increased about 20 times faster than workers’ wages in the past year, based on an analysis of data from the S&P Capital IQ database, the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Adjusted for inflation, the average hourly wage for American private sector workers grew by just 1.3% from 2024 to 2025, according to Oxfam and ITUC’s analysis. In comparison, earnings for the 384 CEOs in the S&P 500 for whom pay data is available increased by 25.6% between 2024 and 2025.
CEOs are paid an average of 281 times more than the typical worker, according to a September 2025 report by the Economic Policy Institute, with CEOs taking home an average total of $22.98 million in 2024. That’s up from a ratio of 60 just three and a half decades ago.
“What the data shows is that we cannot have a conversation about the affordability crisis without talking about extreme inequality, and in particular the extreme inequality between CEO pay and worker pay,” Patricia Stottlemyer, labor rights policy lead for Oxfam America, tells CNBC Make It.
