The Pay Desk · editorial standards
Every figure we publish is drawn from a company's own public regulatory disclosures. We extract them into a structured database, and we print the accession number of the source document alongside the figure so that any reader can open the original and check it.
We do not use survey data, estimates, or third-party compilations for any published figure. If a number cannot be traced to a specific disclosure by a specific company, it does not run.
Nearly 3,000 U.S. public companies across twelve industries: banking, real estate, software, hardware, biopharma and life sciences, medical technology and diagnostics, insurance, utilities, asset management, gaming and lodging, payments and financial infrastructure, and specialty finance.
Coverage includes every company those companies name as a compensation peer, held to the same standard. A peer group is an argument a committee makes about itself, and an unchecked peer group is how that argument goes unexamined.
Deterministic queries against the structured data find the outliers: pay multiples, out-of-cycle grants, peer groups that skew large, undisclosed performance targets, sustained investor opposition.
A candidate is rejected automatically unless it carries its source. For a claim about one company that means the accession and a link to the document. For an aggregate it means the exact cohort as data, the counts, and at least three real example filings. Nothing is ever supplied to make a card pass this gate.
A model writes the card. Every numeric token in the draft is checked against the structured record it claims to describe, and a draft containing a number that does not reconcile is rejected rather than corrected.
A person approves or rejects every item before it publishes. There is no path from the database to a reader that does not pass a human.
A figure about one company cites that company's filing. A figure across many companies cannot — there is no single filing to point at — so it cites a section below instead. Each one states the question in plain English, who is counted and who is not, the date the count was taken, and the number of companies in it. Every list is downloadable. If you want to know exactly who is in a number we published, open the list and check it.
The question: which companies disclose a CEO pay ratio of at least 500 to 1? Who is counted: every company in our coverage whose most recent disclosed ratio is 500:1 or greater. The ratio is read as the company printed it; we do not recompute it from pay figures. Who is not: companies that disclose no ratio, and companies below the threshold.
View the companies counted · Download CSV
The question: which companies drew under 80% support at every one of their last three annual say-on-pay votes? How support is measured: votes cast for, as a share of votes for and against. Abstentions are excluded. Who is counted: a company qualifies only if all three of those votes fell below 80%. The years are the fiscal years the company itself labels 2023, 2024 and 2025, so for a company with a non-calendar year the meetings may fall in later calendar years.
View the companies counted · Download CSV
The question: in each industry, what share of companies do not disclose the performance goals behind their incentive plans? Who is counted: companies in that industry whose compensation discussion is in our coverage. Both the numerator and the denominator are published per industry, so the percentage can be checked against the counts rather than taken on trust. Who is not: industries with no covered companies, and companies whose most recent disclosure we do not hold.
View the industry counts · Download CSV
Compensation figures are keyed to the fiscal year label a company printed in its own disclosure, not to a calendar year we assigned. Companies with non-calendar fiscal years are reported on their own calendar.
One consequence worth stating plainly: a company's discussion of an investor vote in a given year's disclosure refers to the prior year's vote. We never compare the two as though they were the same year, and neither should anyone reading a compensation discussion.
Any company named in a feature gets 48 hours to comment before publication. Daily cards, which report a disclosed figure and nothing else, do not carry a comment window. Replies run, and "declined to comment" runs too.
The Pay Desk is AI-assisted and human-edited. Extraction, detection, and drafting are machine work under the checks above. The decision to publish is a person's.