Top CEOs pocket 86 times more per year than average Crawley worker

The High Pay Centre said some of the country's lowest paid jobs have been the most important during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that income inequality may now be harder to justify.

The think tank estimates the median annual pay of FTSE 100 CEOs was £2.7 million (around £827.69 per hour of their 12.5-hour days) in 2020 – the latest data available.

Assuming they start work at 8.30am, they will earn a Crawley full-time worker's median salary (£31,335 in 2021) by around on Friday, January 7 – just the fourth working day of the year.

This means it would take an average Crawley employee 86 years to earn the annual salary of a top CEO.

The median is used to stop figures being skewed by particularly small or large wages, and it is assumed that CEOs work 62.5 hours a week.

High Pay Centre director Luke Hildyard said: "Covid-19 has shown how much we all depend on each other. Some of the lowest-paying jobs have played the most important role to keep society functioning through the pandemic.

"With the value of the UK economy reduced, there’s also greater pressure to share what we do have more evenly.

"In this context, vast CEO to worker pay differences may be harder to justify."

The average Crawley salary was down from £31,493 in 2020.

Meanwhile, the High Pay Centre said CEO pay had also fallen by 17% from £3.3 million in 2019, making it the first time since it was founded in 2011 that CEOs have needed to work into a fourth day to earn the same annual pay as a full-time worker in the UK.

Danny Magill, senior research officer at the Equality Trust, said: "In a year where this country has faced unprecedented economic challenges, most CEOs pay packages barely changed, showing how detached high earning CEOs’ have become from the realities of ordinary working people.