Households saw a 500-times gap: Australia's highest-paid executive collected almost $48 million in the 2025 financial year, driven by realised pay awarded to Life360 executive chairman Chris Hulls. The payout is recorded in the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors' analysis of CEO realised pay for the 2024-25 reporting year. ACSI used the Australian Bureau of Statistics average weekly full-time earnings figure of $2,083.20 to calculate the multiple. The same analysis shows the ASX100 cohort's average realised pay rose to $6,005,219 in FY2025, lifting the average ASX100 CEO to about 55 times the average full-time wage.
Investors face a changing top tier: ACSI found big, one-off equity vestings and cross-border listings pushed the headline pay numbers higher.
How ACSI measured realised pay
The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors examined realised pay across ASX-listed companies for the 2025 financial year, covering 80 ASX100 CEOs, 68 ASX101-200 CEOs and 15 executives at ASX200 entities that aren't domiciled in Australia and so don't report under Australia’s disclosure framework. ACSI calculates realised pay as fixed pay plus cash bonuses and the value of equity or one-off cash incentives that vested during the reporting year.
That approach matters because one-off equity events can create large spikes in a single year without changing ongoing fixed pay. Across the ASX100, average realised pay rose to $6,005,219 in FY2025 from $5,732,321 the prior year. The median pay outcome for an ASX100 CEO was $1.83 million, about four per cent higher than the prior year but still below the record median of $1.95 million recorded in 2012.
At the top of ACSI's ranking was Life360 executive chairman Chris Hulls, a US-based entrepreneur who lives in the United States, with realised pay reported at about $47.7 million to $48 million in FY2025. US-based chief executives filled five of the top 10 positions in ACSI’s list, the first time outsiders have taken half of the top 10 in the study's history. The top three payers were US-domiciled executives, with ResMed's Mick Farrell and News Corporation's Robert Thomson also among the highest earners.
The highest-paid Australian-based CEO on the list was Sigma Healthcare's Vikesh Ramsunder, who took home $36.62 million after the company's merger with Chemist Warehouse. Macquarie Group's Shemara Wikramanayake was the next-highest Australian-based executive at $30.39 million.
ACSI flagged investor scrutiny as a brake on rising fixed and cash pay. The analysis found CEOs are more likely to leave their roles than to miss out on bonuses: ten ASX100 CEOs departed in the year while only five missed bonus awards. The median bonus outcome for ASX100 CEOs was 70.7 per cent of maximum in FY2025.
Termination payments across ASX100 companies totalled $18.6 million in FY2025, with one large single payout of $5.88 million to a former Rio Tinto chief executive identified as a driver of the increase in average termination costs.
Ed John, ACSI's Executive Manager of Stewardship, framed the US dominance at the top of the list as reflecting cultural differences in board and investor expectations, saying, "Australian investors demand performance hurdles, whereas the standards are much lower in American boardrooms." In her foreword to the report, ACSI chief executive Louise Davidson AM noted that despite a modest rise in median pay this year, CEO pay remains below the 2012 peak and that investor vigilance is required to prevent US-style pay inflation transferring to Australian-listed companies.
US-based chiefs filled five of the top 10 slots, the first time outsiders have taken half the top 10, a shift ACSI ties to large one-off equity vestings and cross-border listings.
This article was created with AI assistance.
