'Fat Cat Thursday' highlights massive CEO salaries

Today is “Fat Cat Thursday” – the day that the UK’s top bosses will have made more money than the typical UK full-time worker will earn in the entire year.

Calculations from independent think tank The High Pay Centre and the CIPD show that pay for top executives will pass the median UK gross annual salary of £28,758 for full-time employees on 4 January 2018, just three working days into the new year.

This is despite 2016 seeing the mean FTSE 100 CEO pay packet fall by a fifth, down from £5.4m million to £4.5 million. FTSE 100 CEO median pay also fell to £3.45 million in 2016, down from £3.97m in 2015. However, despite this year-on-year reduction in total pay among FTSE 100 bosses, the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the average full-time worker stands at 120:1.

Stefan Stern, Director of the High Pay Centre, says that publishing pay ratios will force organisations to consider their pay gaps. “While it was encouraging to see a tiny amount of restraint on pay at the top of some FTSE100 companies last year, there are still grossly excessive and unjustifiable gaps between the top and the rest of the workforce,” he says. “Publishing pay ratios will force boards to acknowledge these gaps.”