CEO pay packages hit another high last year, and some of the Seattle area's largest companies are contributing to that trend.

As CEO pay climbed, the median wage for workers of America's largest corporations rose as well, according to compensation data analysis firm Equilar. Reports from the firm for the past five years show upticks in pay for both CEOs and workers, but with the former showing faster growth most years.

The most recent compensation packages for a veteran CEO like Microsoft's Satya Nadella and a relative newcomer like Starbucks' Brian Niccol amount to almost $100 million on paper. But it's not all cash that they're receiving, as most of their compensation is tied up in stock awards, a common pay structure for top executives in corporate America.

It also doesn't mean they'll receive the money in the same year. Many stock awards vest years later years and if an executive leaves before the shares vested, they could be void.

Packages for Nadella and Niccol, the Seattle area's highest-paid CEOs leading large, publicly traded companies, show a jump from the year before.

In a regulatory filing from October, Microsoft disclosed the total compensation for CEO Satya Nadella had reached nearly $100 million for the company's 2025 fiscal year, which ran from July 2024 through June 2025. The year before, Nadella's pay totaled almost $80 million.

What's been driving the increase in senior executive pay seems to be general market trends," said Jackie Cook, a senior director with Morningstar Sustainalytics. "So much of the pay is stock-based that you tend to see pay linked to the market."

Corporate compensation committees have put in certain benchmarks to gauge the individual CEO performance. Chief executives have cash incentives and future stock awards attached to how well the company is performing in strategic areas. Microsoft, for example, places a high priority on cybersecurity and two years ago Nadella asked for a reduced cash bonus after the company suffered cyberattacks.

But a high share price is in line with shareholders' interests, and there's merit to having a CEO's compensation fluctuate with the company's stock, Cook said.

Microsoft's stock price has suffered lately, but on the year so far it's up by more than 16% compared to the Nasdaq's 20% gain. Starbucks' stock price is down about 8% this year.

Niccol, who joined Starbucks from Chipotle in September 2024, had a $97.8 million compensation package for his first few months on the job. His predecessor, Laxman Narasimhan, had made $14.6 million the year before.

Starbucks paid Niccol a $5 million signing bonus when he was hired, but the 592% increase in total compensation the company doled out to its CEO was mostly due to sizable stock awards meant to replace what he left on the table by leaving Chipotle. In a regulatory filing from January, Starbucks said Niccol was a "highly sought-after" executive when explaining his compensation.

"Some of the justifications for these large pay packages and share-based pay are there are a lot of risks for the executive," Cook said. "Niccol had a lot of shares from his compensation package that went unvested when he left Chipotle."

The median workers' pay at those companies increased between those years as well — but the gap between CEO and median worker grew larger.

The median worker for Starbucks — a part-time barista — made $14,674 in 2024, up about 3.2% from the year before. The median worker for Microsoft made $200,972 in the company's 2025 fiscal year, up 3.6% from the year before.

In a recent CEO pay study, Equilar said the median CEO pay ratio — the relationship between a company's CEO pay and its median worker — for S&P 500 companies rose in 2024 to 192:1, continuing a trend of CEO compensation outpacing worker pay that "shows no sign of slowing."

Two other new Seattle-area CEOs last year, Costco's Ron Vachris and Boeing's Kelly Ortberg, both received lower compensation packages than their predecessors had the year before. Ortberg's pay totaled almost $19.5 million last year and Vachris' came in at $12.3 million.

One of the anomalies among Seattle-area CEOs was Amazon's Andy Jassy, whose compensation, as disclosed in regulatory filings, has come in between $1.3 million and almost $1.6 million from 2022 through 2024.

But when Jassy replaced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, he received stock awards that were valued at more than $212 million. Those will vest through the end of the decade.

While Equilar's analysis over the past few years shows increased CEO pay each year, a report from the AFL-CIO showed a historic peak in 2021 before dipping the next year. Both sets of data agree on one thing: 2025 is a new high.

Cook said 2021 was generally the high point before 2025, as more corporations turned to senior executive pay structures that took on more stock-based pay instead of cash. She also said there was a drop in support for CEO compensation in 2022.

Each year, shareholders vote to approve the pay of senior executives, usually those in the C-suite. In a historically symbolic vote, one always recommended by a company's board to approve that passes easily.

But that "say-on-pay" support faltered in 2022 amid market turmoil, with Amazon as a high-profile case. Jassy's and other executives' compensation packages for 2021 passed in a relative squeaker, with just 56% of shareholders approving them. Amazon's value plunged by about 50% in 2022, during a rough year for Big Tech.

"When shareholders' portfolio values goes down," Cook said, "they're not satisfied.

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