While 2008 was a bad year for just about everybody, it wasn’t so bad for CEOs. Their pay only dropped .08 percent while the S&P 500 was plunging 37.58 percent, according to a preliminary report released Tuesday.

The median total realized compensation–pay that includes stock-based pay like options or awards--for the top dogs declined just 6.38 percent, according to the study, titled Big Pay for Poor Performance, from The Corporate Library, a corporate governance advocacy based in Portland, Maine. Average total realized compensation rose by 7.76 percent, while average total annual compensation rose by 120.71 percent. But researchers pointed out that those rises were due to outliers; in other words, some CEOs had a very good 2008.

“There were many more cuts in the workforce than there were in CEO pay over this period,” said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library and an author of the report.

Of the 2,000 CEOs who were in the job for the entire year, only six saw their pay actually cut, Hodgson said. “We were expecting to see some decline,” Hodgson said of CEO pay. “The decline is incredibly minimal. It wouldn’t have had to shift much for it to have been an increase.”

Still, he pointed out, 2008 was a bad enough year that it produced the first decline in median CEO pay since 2002. And, he added, some of the stock-based pay for CEOs could have been exercised before the market crashed in September, with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the freeze in credit markets.

Some 650 CEOs exercised stock options in 2008.

The study comes out at a time when executive pay is under a magnifying glass. The Conference Board came out with a plan earlier this week to limit executive pay and percs. Pay in the financial services sector is certain to be a topic of conversation at the G-20 meeting starting Thursday, and the Federal Reserve is even looking at limiting pay for bankers.

But it wasn’t bankers who made the big bucks in 2008, as their industry crashed. In 2007, three of the top ten highest-paid CEOs came from the ranks of the financial services industry, and they included Countrywide Financial CEO Anthony Mozilo, who was at the heart of the subprime mortgage industry. In 2008, none of the top ten were in the industry. In 2007, the CEOS of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Ameriprise Financial and The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation each earned more than $10 million. In 2008, that group averaged $1.6 million.

“The disappearance of them from the top 10 is pretty self-explanatory,” Hodgson said. But when it comes to next year’s list, the survivors may well make a comeback. Countrywide and Lehman Brothers obviously won’t make the list, since they’re no longer with us, but, “Goldman Sachs, well, who knows. It’s possible.”

No, instead of financial services, it was oil and coal company executives who dominated the list, with seven of the 10 top earners coming from the energy industry.