Base Salary

Base salary is the fixed annual cash amount an executive is paid, independent of company or individual performance, and it is the first column of the Summary Compensation Table. It typically represents a small minority of a large-company chief executive’s total pay, with the majority delivered through annual incentive and long-term equity awards instead.

Because it is fixed, base salary is often used as a reference point elsewhere in a pay package — severance formulas, target bonus percentages and change-in-control multiples are frequently expressed as a multiple of salary rather than as a standalone dollar figure.

A salary that is unusually low relative to peers is not necessarily evidence of modest total pay; it can equally mean the company has shifted more of the executive’s compensation into variable or equity-based elements, which the salary column alone will not show.

Tim Cook's salary column in Apple's fiscal 2025 Summary Compensation Table reads $3,000,000 — the fixed cash component, before bonus, equity or any other element.