The number of big-company boards adding one-off awards to regular pay packages is surging, along with the amounts. Altogether, S&P 500 companies doled out $1.7 billion in special awards last year, up 50% from a year earlier, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of pay data from research firm Equilar. Nearly half the companies have made at least one such award over the past two years, and a quarter have made multiple.
Dozens of executives received back-to-back special awards over the past two years, including Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins. Special awards have helped drive some of the heftiest CEO pay packages to dramatic heights, including those for Zaslav and Crowd Strike’s George Kurtz.
Median pay for S&P 500 CEOs reached $17.9 million last year, up from $11 million a decade earlier. Several factors appear to be driving the surge, including a jump in CEO turnover. Boards often use special awards to lure or lock in executive talent.
Within the S&P 500, 67 leaders departed in 2025, up 29% from 2023, and 36 left in the first half of 2026, corporate-governance software-maker Diligent said. Many investors frown on the routine use of one-off payments, preferring consistent long-term performance measures for setting compensation. Mutual-fund company T.
Rowe Price lists special equity awards among pay practices that it considers outdated or at risk of divorcing executives’ interests from those of shareholders in its proxy voting guidelines. But boards right now appear to be more concerned with securing the leadership they have while navigating AI and economic uncertainty, pay consultants say. The danger is that special payouts eclipse more structured compensation plans that pay out less or nothing if performance is poor, said David Kokell, Institutional Shareholder Services’ head of U.S. compensation research.
Seventeen have already reported granting more than $600 million in special awards to more than 40 executives during fiscal years that ended in 2026, Equilar data show. The biggest special award, of course, was Elon Musk’s $132 billion blockbuster from Tesla in November, tied in part to the company’s performance in achieving specific market capitalization and operational milestones.
Source: Wall Street Journal US Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing