Money talk is dirty talk, or at least it used to be. Nowadays, Ireland’s top paid chief executives or Rich Lists are guaranteed to attract eyeballs. Billionaire chief executives openly brag about their financial worth and lust for the trillionaire label, held briefly by Tesla’s Elon Musk last month.The top dogs’ braggadocio is unseemly but salary transparency is good for workers, the business and investors, too. When we know what the highest paid chief executives earn we can compare it to the average worker’s wage in that company. Is the size of workers’ pay packets growing at a similar rate as the big bosses’ salary and benefits packages? Are the top moneyed chief executives creating value for customers and increasing shareholders’ profits? The average package of the 19 chief executives of Ireland’s largest quoted companies rose 9.6 per cent to €4.79 million in 2025, according to figures compiled by The Irish Times Markets Correspondent Joe Brennan earlier this month, a third consecutive annual increase. The median package, a measure that strips out highest and lowest earner outliers, was €3.83 million. The median salary in the Republic was €44,816 in 2024, according to the Central Statistics Office. So, the median Irish plc chief executive, in other words, earns roughly 85 times the median worker.This gives us a general overall figure of chief executive pay for Ireland’s big wigs, but how do we get a view into staff pay at these companies? Publicly listed companies in Ireland must report chief executive remuneration data. Companies listed on US or British stock exchanges – including Irish companies – must provide additional information: average median worker pay.For the intrepid data hunter, European gender pay gap reporting provides another part of the picture. It’s been a legal requirement for employers with 50 or more employees to publish this information from last year but it started with 250 or more employees in 2022. “Pay gap reporting is designed to give us an insight into companies – how workers progress, who’s at the top, and whether a company is changing over time,” says data analyst and campaigner Jen Keane, founder of PayGap.ie.[ CEO pay in Ireland in 2025: One executive earned $237mOpens in new window ]It’s the only statutory window we have into pay for ordinary workers inside Irish companies. Not salaries, admittedly. You won’t find out what John or Jane sitting next to you makes but it does reveal the gaps between them. It gives us medians though, and the median is where the truth tends to live.“The mean is what most people would understand if you said an ‘average’ number – totalling up all the values and dividing it by the number of values. It’s well understood, but prone to being skewed by a handful of very high or very low values (for example, one very well paid CEO),” Keane says. “Gender pay gap reports must include a median. To find a median, you place all your values in one list, ordered from lowest to highest, and find the middle value of this list. This is less prone to being skewed by single values, and when combined with the mean, can tell us about progression and pay in a company.” Let’s start where the data gives us the fullest picture. Peter Jackson of Flutter Entertainment was again the best-paid boss of an Irish-rooted plc last year, at $19.7 million (€17.2 million) – 351 times the median $56,101 earned across the group’s 25,800 staff. We know that ratio only because companies listed on both the US and British stock exchanges must provide the data. Flutter’s New York listing puts it under US Securities and Exchange Commission rules. Tony Smurfit’s $16.4 million at Smurfit Westrock – 271 times his employees’ median – is disclosed for the same reason. Michael Stanley of Cairn Homes topped the Irish-listed table at €8.56 million, up 228 per cent. Cairn publishes no pay ratio, because a company whose main listing is on the Irish Stock Exchange is not required to. Neither must Glenveagh Properties, where Stephen Garvey’s package rose 30 per cent to €3.55 million. Nor Ryanair, where Michael O’Leary’s €3.83 million sits at the exact median of The Irish Times list (though there is nothing middling about his share options worth a net €100 million-plus, or a contract extension to 2032 that could add another €150 million more). Nor Kingspan, Glanbia, Uniphar, Grafton, Origin Enterprises, FBD or Dole’s Irish business. For those companies, workers’ pay comes into view through their gender pay gap reports. In the absence of a State platform, PayGap.ie offers a useful centralised resource with this information. Ryanair reports a mean gender pay gap of 51 per cent, unchanged year on year, with a median of 20 per cent and women’s share of the top pay quartile at just 12 per cent. “When there’s a large mean pay gap, it usually means that women are not progressing to the highest levels of a company, to those senior leadership roles. We see that where the upper middle quartile [the people making the second-highest salaries] is a little over half female, but then women hit a glass ceiling and don’t make it into that upper echelon,” Keane says. Uniphar’s Irish entities show a median gap of 28 per cent and a mean bonus gap of 83 per cent; at its Allcare pharmacy chain the median hourly gap is 60 per cent and the median bonus gap 81.8 per cent – reflecting a largely female retail workforce beneath a smaller, better-paid tier of employees.[ The gender gap among senior civil servants is closing, but not at secretary general levelOpens in new window ]Glanbia’s median gap is 19 per cent, its mean bonus gap 58 per cent. FBD reports a median of 27 per cent; Bank of Ireland 20 per cent – though the bank, to its credit, also tells us that Myles O’Grady’s €1.86 million package (up 36 per cent) is 27 times its staff median.To understand what these percentages feel like from below, consider Jane’s world. Jane is a composite, but every number is taken from a company’s self-reported 2025 filings. Jane is a middle manager who earns €65,000 – good money, half as much again as the national median. Her employer’s median pay gap is 22.4 per cent, so the man at the midpoint of the same payroll earns almost €84,000 to her €65,000. The bonus line is starker still: with a median bonus gap of 64.3 per cent, if Jane’s bonus is €5,000, his is around €14,000. Oh boy. And the chief executive – a man, like every chief executive named in this column – took home €3.55 million last year, roughly 55 times Jane’s salary.Then Jane reads the least discussed and most eloquent table in any gender pay gap report: the quartiles. Women hold 22 per cent of the top pay quartile at her employer, a share that slipped a point last year. Four in five of the best-paid jobs are held by men. None of this is a like-for-like comparison – the median gap measures the shape of an organisation, not Jane’s last salary review. But the shape is precisely what Jane is trying to climb, and the filings tell her what the careers page will not: her statistical odds of reaching the floors where the money is. It doesn’t look good for Jane.Margaret E Ward is chief executive of Clear Eye, a leadership consultancy. margaret@cleareye.ie