Rising Pay of Chief Financial Officers

While shareholders, proxy advisers, and activists are often up in arms over chief executive pay, they usually pay little attention to what a company's finance chief makes.

It turns out that median C.F.O. pay moved up faster (5.2 percent) than C.E.O. pay (1.3 percent) did last year.

That's according to Equilar, the executive compensation benchmarking company, which surveyed the pay packages of 313 S&P 500 chief financial officers who had been in their jobs for at least two years.

The median C.F.O. compensation rose to $2,894,275 in 2007 from $2,752,027 in 2006, according to Equilar, in Redwood Shores, California.

"The C.F.O.'s role is getting more complex and more visible," said Alexander Cwirko-Godycki, spokesman for Equilar. In part, that's a reflection, he noted, of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for signing off on public disclosure statements.

Overall, C.F.O.'s got the tidy pay increase even thought there was a 3.4 percent downturn in median bonus payouts. That was offset by the healthy 8.2 percent hike in median total compensation, which includes base salary, discretionary bonuses, non-equity incentive plan payouts, the grant date value of stock and option awards, and other compensation.

The median base salary of the chief financial officers surveyed rose 9.1 percent, to $535,000 last year from $481,250 in 2006. In comparison, media salary for chief executives rose 3 percent, according to a separate Equilar study.

The median aggregate bonus -- $576,880 -- was down 3.4 percent last year from $597,263 in 2006. And the prevalence of C.F.O.'s receiving any form of bonus at all fell from 99.0 percent in 2006 to 93.6 percent last year. Equilar's earlier study registered a 4.9 percent increase for chief executives.

by Elizabeth Olson