CFO Compensation Falls Due To Slower Pension Growth

A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from S&P Global Market Intelligence found that overall compensation for chief finance officers for 332 companies in the country fell by 1.5% compared to last year, owing to the slower rate of growth of pensions.

As explained in an article on the WSJ website:

This year’s major change was in the rate of pension growth. Pensions and deferred compensation, which are combined in proxy filings, grew by about half as much as they did in 2014, for the 134 companies in the group that listed a figure in that category.

Pension values are more a function of accounting, “driven by actuarial assumptions,” rather than strategic decisions, so they could fluctuate “simply because you change mortality assumptions or discount rates,” said Joseph Sorrentino, managing director of Steven Hall & Partners, an executive-compensation consulting firm.

Median pay for finance executives without deferred compensation and pension fluctuations, on the other hand, rose to $3.4 million this year from $3.3 million last year.