Summary Compensation Table (SCT)

The Summary Compensation Table is required by Item 402(c) of Regulation S-K in the proxy statement for every annual meeting at which directors are elected, which in practice means every U.S. public company publishes one every year. It covers only the named executive officers, the small group whose individual pay the company must disclose by name. Everything else in the proxy’s executive compensation section — the grants behind the awards, the equity still unvested, the amounts payable on a termination — is disclosed at that same individual level for that same group.

The table’s columns are fixed by rule and appear in the same order at every company: Salary, Bonus, Stock Awards, Option Awards, Non-Equity Incentive Plan Compensation, Change in Pension Value and Nonqualified Deferred Compensation Earnings, All Other Compensation, and Total. That standardization is the point. Because two companies fill the same columns under the same definitions, this is the one place in executive pay where a figure from one company can be set beside a figure from another without first checking what each company meant by a word like "bonus".

The Total column is the arithmetic sum of the other columns in that executive’s row for that fiscal year. It is the most frequently quoted number in press coverage, proxy adviser reports and shareholder proposals, which follows from the standardization rather than from any claim that the sum is the best single measure of pay. Each year is reported as its own row, so the table answers both what an executive was paid in the most recent year and how that figure has moved across the period shown.

The stock and option award columns report grant-date fair value under ASC 718 — an accounting value fixed on the day the award was made, based on the number of units or shares and the stock price that day. For an option, the value also reflects a pricing model’s estimate of volatility and term; for a performance award, the probability that the performance condition will be met. None of that is cash, and none of it changes when the stock price moves afterward.

The pension column behaves differently from the rest. It reports the actuarial change in the value of the executive’s pension benefits and above-market earnings on nonqualified deferred compensation during the year, and it can be negative when plan experience or the discount rate used to value the liability moves against the benefit. A negative figure there reduces the row’s total rather than being floored at zero.

Most filers show three completed fiscal years: the most recent year plus the two before it. Companies using the scaled disclosure available to smaller reporting companies and emerging growth companies present two fiscal years instead. A company can also add or drop a named executive officer from one year to the next, so a row that appears in one proxy is not guaranteed to appear in the next.

Two limits are worth carrying into any reading of the table. It does not report realized value: an executive exercising options or selling vested shares is realizing awards made in earlier years, and that appears here only if a grant made in the current year happened to be reported at grant value. And the table is not the only pay number a proxy contains — the Pay Versus Performance disclosure reports Compensation Actually Paid for the same executives and years, and the director compensation table covers the board rather than management.

The footnotes are part of the disclosure rather than decoration. The components of all other compensation are itemized by type, the performance measures behind a non-equity incentive award are described, and any treatment the column heading does not make clear is explained there. Reading the columns without the footnotes is what produces most of the misreadings of this table.

Apple's Summary Compensation Table reports Tim Cook's fiscal 2025 total compensation at $74,294,811, the sum of every column the table prints for that year.