CEO salary has risen by 47% since 2017, outpacing inflation and average wage growth
The Energy and Policy Institute released a staggering executive summary on CEO’s compensations for 2025. The results show that investor-owned electric and gas utilities paid their CEOs $626 million in 2025. That means that from 2017 to 2025, utilities have paid their CEOs more than $5.2 billion. CEOs received an average of $12.4 million in compensation for 2025, an increase of nearly 16 percent from 2024. 27 utility CEOs received pay increases exceeding $1 million. Since 2017, average utility CEO compensation has risen 47 percent, significantly outpacing inflation and average wage growth for American workers.
Top Ten Earners:
- American Electric Power (AEP) compensated CEO Bill Fehrman $36.6 million in 2025, making him the highest-paid utility CEO of the year by a wide margin
- Chris Womack, CEO of Georgia-based Southern Company and the top-paid utility executive in 2024. Womack raked in $28.2 million in 2025, the same year that subsidiary Georgia Power disconnected customers 311,513 times.
- Florida-based NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum came in third with $24.2 million in compensation for 2025, the same year that state utility regulators granted its subsidiary Florida Power & Light’s request to saddle its customers with a record-breaking $6.9 billion rate hike.
- A compensation package worth $22.2 million landed San Diego-based Sempra Energy CEO Jeffrey Martin in fourth place as Sempra subsidiary San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) combats a campaign for public power that one study estimated could save customers between $6 billion and $15 billion over 30 years.
- Gregory Abel of Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway received the fifth-largest pay package in 2025, at $22 million.
- Consolidated Edison (ConEd) CEO Timothy Cawley with $19.9 million in compensation for 2025. It would take an average New York worker 218 years to match Cawley’s earnings. In 2025, ConEd disconnected New York customers more than 190,000 times and ended 2025 with 414,210 customers behind on their bills, owing a combined $871 million.
- Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) CEO Patricia Poppe with $19.8 million. An average California worker would have to work for 210 years to make as much as Poppe did in 2025.
- Entergy CEO Andrew Marsh with $16.8 million. The average Louisiana worker would have to work 271 years to match Marsh’s earnings.
- Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro with $16.5 million. An average California worker would need to work 175 years to meet Pizarro’s earnings.
- Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue with $16 million. In Virginia, an average worker would have to work for 205 years to meet Blue’s earnings. Dominion South Carolina disconnected customers 118,292 times in 2025.
“So long as profits increase, utility executives will be rewarded with six- and seven-figure pay raises, regardless of how many customers are struggling to make ends meet,” said Jonathan Kim, Research and Communications Manager at the Energy and Policy Institute. “As their companies continue to ask for rate increase after rate increase, the idea that CEOs deserve to make up to 500 times more than the customers they’re supposed to serve is insulting.”
From 2021 to 2024, U.S. electric utilities collected more than $200 billion in profit, with an average of 12.8 cents of every dollar collected from electric customers’ bills going to profit. In 2025, preliminary data indicate that profit share has increased to 14.6 cents of every dollar. AEP ties executive compensation directly to regulatory outcomes that burden ratepayers. Five other utilities link executive pay to return on equity (ROE), a metric closely tied to higher customer rates, and many other utilities prioritize profit in executive incentives.
The full executive compensation summary can be found online at https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-ceo-pay-2025/.