Industry survey
Executive compensation survey
Benchmark C-suite and board pay across a defined peer group, with the confidentiality controls the data demands.
What an executive compensation survey has to get right
An executive compensation survey collects total compensation data for senior leadership and board roles across a defined peer group. The audience is usually a compensation committee that needs a defensible basis for the decision it is about to make.
Two things make this different from every other survey on this site. Salary is often the smallest component, so an instrument that stops at base pay is close to useless. And the cohort is small by definition, which means confidentiality is not a setting you tune at the end. It is the constraint you design around from the first question.
What it measures
Inside a executive compensation survey
Roles and peer group
Chief executive, finance, operations, technology, and other C-level roles, plus board chair and director positions. Peer group definition is captured explicitly, because a benchmark is only meaningful against a stated comparison set.
- Organization size, sector, and structure as context
- Board and committee roles handled separately
- Custom roles for organization-specific structures
Total compensation, fully unbundled
Base is one line. The instrument separates every other component so the committee can see what a peer actually pays rather than a blended figure.
- Annual and performance bonus, target and actual
- Equity, phantom equity, and long-term incentive
- Deferred compensation and supplemental retirement
Terms and practice
The questions a committee asks that a wage survey never covers, captured as structured fields rather than free text.
- Severance and change-of-control practice
- Perquisites and allowances
- Board retainer, meeting fees, and committee premiums
The peer group is the whole argument
For executive pay, the comparison set carries more weight than the statistics computed from it. A committee that cannot defend why a given organization is in the peer group cannot defend the benchmark either, and this is exactly where an executive study is challenged.
Define the peer set on stated criteria such as sector, size, structure, and region, record those criteria in the report, and hold the set stable year over year so movement in the data means something.
Confidentiality
A single executive row is identifying by definition
Most organizations have exactly one chief executive. That makes an executive survey the hardest confidentiality case on this site: the usual protections are not conservative enough, because a cell holding one person is not anonymized by rounding.
Executive studies therefore run with a higher suppression threshold, tighter control over which dimensions can slice the data, and a deliberate decision about what will never be published at all. Setting those rules before fielding is what makes participants willing to submit accurate figures.
- Raise the threshold for this survey. The suppression minimum is configurable per survey, so an executive study can run well above the default used for a wage survey.
- Restrict filter axes deliberately. Every additional slicing dimension is another path to identification. Designate as few as the report genuinely needs.
- Exclude questions from publication. Collect a data point for internal review and keep it out of the released report entirely.
- Preview every audience view before release. See exactly what participants and subscribers will see, then release on your schedule and revoke if needed.
How to run one
The full methodology lives in our complete wage and benefits survey guide. These are the steps that differ for this industry.
Step 1
Agree the peer group before anything else
Write the inclusion criteria down and get the committee to sign off. Doing this after results arrive turns every subsequent conversation into an argument about the sample rather than the decision.
Step 2
Unbundle compensation in the instrument
Ask for base, target bonus, actual bonus paid, equity or long-term incentive, and deferred arrangements as separate fields. Never accept a single total, because you will not be able to tell what is inside it.
Step 3
Set suppression rules first, then field
Decide the threshold, the filter axes, and anything that will not be published before invitations go out. Tell participants what those rules are. In a small cohort that disclosure is usually what determines whether you get real numbers.
Step 4
Report against the stated peer set
Present percentiles alongside the peer criteria and the response count. A benchmark without its cohort described is not evidence, and a committee will be asked to defend it.
Common questions
How do you keep individual executive pay confidential in a small peer group?
By designing for it rather than patching afterward. Raise the suppression threshold for the survey, restrict which dimensions can slice results, and decide up front which items are collected for internal review only and never published. You preview every audience view before releasing anything.
Should we survey equity and deferred compensation, or just cash?
Survey all of it, in separate fields. For senior roles the incentive and deferred components frequently determine whether an offer is competitive, and a cash-only benchmark will read as low against peers who weight compensation differently.
Who should define the peer group?
The compensation committee, on stated criteria, before the survey is fielded. Our role is to make the criteria explicit in the instrument and the report. If the methodology itself needs scrutiny, the Ph.D. methodology review covers exactly this.
Can we run this alongside a broader staff wage survey?
Yes, and they should stay separate instruments with separate release controls. The license includes up to three surveys a year, so an executive study and a staff wage survey can run in the same year without changing the price.
Keep reading
How to run a wage and benefits survey
The complete methodology, including job matching, market cuts, and publishing results that hold up.
Reading your survey results
How to structure a report for a board, read percentiles honestly, and handle outliers and thin cells.
Salary benchmarking template
The wage grid structure and what each percentile band actually means for a pay decision.
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