The latest tech craze has made billionaires of at least two well-known CFOs, but finance leaders at comparatively under-the-radar companies are still doing quite well for themselves.
The three highest paid CFOs at American publicly traded firms all pulled in over $130 million in total compensation last year, and only one of them worked at a company benefitting from AI hype. Manmeet Soni, finance chief of biopharmaceutical oncology firm Summit Therapeutics, was far and away the highest compensated finance chief, receiving total compensation just shy of $250 million. That includes a base salary of $616,500, which was comparatively less than several other CFOs on the list.
That’s all according to a ranking and analysis of CFO compensation at public companies in the U.S. by Texas-based C-Suite Comp.
In an interview, C-Suite Comp Founder Tanvir Houssain suggested that pay situations like Soni’s are not entirely unusual these days.
“More and more executives getting compensated based on performance” of their companies, Houssain said. “They’re getting performance share units and stock awards, and stock awards form a very significant portion of their compensation package. Salary is quite minimal.”
As further evidence of that trend, consider the second highest-paid CFO on C-Suite Comp’s list: Timothy McHugh, finance chief at senior living real estate company Welltower Inc. Though his $700,000 salary was actually higher than Soni’s, McHugh’s total compensation was $167 million. Miles Everson, CFO and secretary, at hyperscaler Fermi, had total compensation of over $134 million in 2025, including a base salary of $125,000.
Meanwhile, in C-Suite Comp’s ranking of the 17 highest paid CFOs at American public companies, the tech sector’s outsized effect on the economy at large was clear, with nine individuals on the list working at firms categorized as either “technology” or “information technology.”
Houssain said that, for now, software and AI are “growth industries.”
That trend was reflected in C-Suite Comp’s analysis of midmarket public firms, those recording $1 billion in annual revenue or less.
“For mid-market CFOs, the median pay crossed the seven-figure threshold and is the highest it has been in at least five years,” Houssain said. “At least 70% of the top 10 CFOs in the mid-market segment are from the tech industry.”
With SpaceX’s recent entry into the public markets and forthcoming IPOs from artificial intelligence giants OpenAI and Anthropic, the 2026 ranking of CFO pay may look a bit different. But Houssain believes that performance-based compensation is likely to stick around in any case.
C-Suite Comp’s research also detected an uptick in CFO pay at both S&P 500 companies and Rusell 3000 firms. Finance chiefs at S&P 500 companies on average saw their compensation grow by about 4.2% to around $7.6 million, while Russell 3000 CFOs saw compensation grow by an average of 11.9% to nearly $4 million.
That tracks with other recent research on CFO pay. Compensation Advisory Partners, for instance, found that finance chiefs’ pay at big U.S. public companies bumped up by a median 8%.
