Executive Compensation Benchmarking, the Free-Data Method

Search “executive compensation benchmarking” and every result on page one is the same pitch: a survey vendor, a consulting platform, or a paid benchmarking tool. Gallagher wants you inside a Russell 3000 report. Korn Ferry wants you on its Touchstone platform. One listing prices the service between $5,000 and $25,500. None of them show you the method, and most gate the actual numbers behind a form.

That’s a real gap for a search firm pricing a mandate this week, not next quarter. You don’t need a subscription to build a defensible comp band.

You need to know which public sources to pull, in what order, and how to cross-check the result so it holds up when a client’s own comp committee pushes back, the same comp benchmark that’s one module of every market map we build.

What the page-one results are actually selling

Two things, bundled: aggregated survey data, and someone else doing the peer-group work for you. Both have a real limit for a search assignment.

Surveys are lagged and generic. A benchmarking survey closes its data collection window, gets processed, and publishes months later, useful for a board setting annual pay policy, less useful for pricing one specific seat at one specific company this month. And every published survey aggregates across companies you didn’t pick, at a size and structure that may not match your target.

Korn Ferry’s own guidance on this actually makes the case against relying on any single source: it recommends combining proxy filings, surveys, and placement data, then routes you to its paid Touchstone platform to do the combining. The advice is sound. The paid layer is optional if you’re willing to do the pulling yourself.

Classify the target before you pull anything

The method branches on one question: is the target company public or private? That decision determines whether you’re reading a filed fact or building an estimate.

Public target

Its own SEC EDGAR filing is the benchmark. No peer group, no discount, no estimation. Pull the most recent DEF 14A (the proxy statement) and go straight to two sections:

• The Summary Compensation Table gives the hard numbers for each named executive officer: salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive pay, total. For a “what does this seat cost this year” question, use base plus target annual bonus, not the total column, which folds in multi-year equity grants and overstates year-one cash.
• The Compensation Discussion and Analysis (CD&A) section gives the structure behind the number: target bonus as a percentage of base, the long-term incentive mix, and, useful for your own work, the peer group the company itself benchmarks against. Steal their peer set; a public company’s comp committee already did that homework.

Private target

No filing exists, so you build a peer-proxy band instead.

How do you benchmark a private company’s executive pay?

Pick two to four public companies matched on sector, comparable revenue scale (ideally within roughly half to double the target’s size, so the size discount below stays small), and the same role level, CEO to CEO, CFO to CFO. Pull each one’s DEF 14A the same way as above: base plus target bonus, from the Summary Comp Table.

Then apply two discounts, and label them separately:

1. Size discount. Executive cash pay scales with company revenue, but not linearly, a peer at several times the target’s revenue is not several times the true benchmark. Discount toward the target’s actual scale rather than taking the peer number at face value.
2. Private-company discount. Private and PE-backed companies typically pay less cash than public peers of the same size. The gap doesn’t disappear: it usually shows up as equity or rollover with real upside at exit instead of cash today. State that plainly rather than quoting a cash number that looks light without the context.

Both of these are judgment calls on top of filed facts, which is exactly why the next step isn’t optional.

Cross-check against a real survey, don’t skip this

A peer-proxy band you built yourself, with no outside check, is one source. The standard we hold every Market Map to is two independent sources for anything load-bearing, and comp is the most load-bearing, most checkable number in the whole deliverable. Land your discounted band next to a published survey for the same size tier.

Heidrick & Struggles’ 2025 Private Equity-Backed CEO Compensation Survey is a clean anchor for this: a real, free-to-download report built from 306 self-reported U.S. and Canadian CEOs at PE-backed companies, broken out by revenue tier.

Company size (annual revenue)	Avg. cash base	Avg. cash bonus	Avg. total cash	YoY change
$50M or less	$427K	$354K	$735K	+38%
$51M-$100M	$463K	$309K	$766K	+17%
$101M-$250M	$548K	$373K	$906K	-9%
$251M-$500M	$765K	$577K	$1,328K	+33%
$501M-$1B	$668K	$803K	$1,471K	+21%
More than $1B	$834K	$921K	$1,653K	+7%

Source: Heidrick & Struggles, 2025 Private Equity-Backed Chief Executive Officer Compensation Survey, n=306 (U.S. and Canada), self-reported, 2025 figures. Average base and average bonus are drawn from Heidrick's base/bonus breakout and average total cash from its separate year-over-year table, each computed over a slightly different respondent base, so base plus bonus will not sum exactly to total cash in every row.

Two things worth naming out loud when you use this table. It’s PE-backed companies specifically, so a founder-owned private company without a sponsor may run differently, especially on the equity side.

And the year-over-year swings are real and large (a 9% decline at the $101M-$250M tier against double-digit gains everywhere else), which is itself a reason not to trust a comp number more than 12-18 months old: this market moves.

Where government wage data helps, and where it can’t

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program is free, current, and covers every metro in the country, real strengths for a geographic adjustment. Its Chief Executives occupation code (11-1011) is genuinely useful for two things: sanity-checking a wage floor, and applying a metro cost-of-living differential when your peer companies sit in a different region than your target.

It’s the wrong tool for pricing the top of the range. BLS reporting is top-coded: percentile wages cap at $239,200 a year, well under what most mid-market CEO or senior C-suite seats actually pay once bonus and equity are counted. Treat it as a floor and a geographic multiplier, never a ceiling.

The honest limits of this method

No free source publishes named, current cash compensation for a healthy private company. The only public windows into named private-company pay are bankruptcy incentive-plan filings (distressed companies only) and nonprofit Form 990s (a different sector entirely), neither covers the case you’ll hit most often. For a private, going-concern target, a defensible range is the ceiling of what free data gets you, not a point number.

Equity and carried interest are the least visible piece. Heidrick’s own survey data shows why: reported long-term incentive value at exit ranges from under $10M to over $20M depending on board involvement and geography, a wide enough spread that citing a single “typical equity” figure would be closer to a guess than a benchmark.

Structure (equity vehicle, vesting, rollover mechanics) is knowable from CD&A peer disclosures; the specific dollar upside at a private target is not.

That flips when the question is a candidate rather than a target company. If the person you’re trying to move is already a named executive officer at a public company, their unvested equity isn’t an estimate at all: it’s filed, dollar for dollar, in their own employer’s proxy statement. And comparable companies’ own offer-letter filings show what it actually costs to buy that equity out, real make-whole grants, not a guess.

Label every figure, every time

The discipline that makes any of this defensible: a public company’s filed number is a fact, cited to the DEF 14A. A peer-derived, discounted band for a private target is an estimate, cited to the peers and the discount logic applied. A survey cross-check is exactly what it says it is, a published, dated stat from someone else’s sample.

Mixing these together without labeling them is how a comp section loses a client’s trust, the same discipline behind every part of a market map we build.

None of this replaces judgment on the search itself: does the candidate’s expected move include an equity story or not, does the client’s budget actually clear the band you built.

It means walking into that conversation with a number you can defend line by line, not one you’re hoping nobody asks about, the same “which claims can I actually defend” discipline covered in how executive search firms are using AI without losing that rigor.

Every comp figure in a MergeSearch Market Map is built exactly this way: your first month is free, so you can see one built against a real brief before deciding anything.

Sources

• Heidrick & Struggles, 2025 Private Equity-Backed Chief Executive Officer Compensation Survey (n=306 U.S./Canada CEOs, self-reported).
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR full-text filing search (DEF 14A Summary Compensation Table and CD&A).
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Chief Executives (SOC 11-1011).
• Korn Ferry, "Board of Director Guide to CEO Compensation Benchmarking."