Nearly a quarter of American voters have a blunt message for the country’s top executives: earn less, share more, and stop being greedy. That’s the takeaway from a new national survey released at the end of July, and it lands at a moment when the gap between CEO paychecks and worker wages has rarely looked wider.
What the Survey Found
The poll was conducted by Echelon Insights and Brunswick Group, which surveyed 1,001 registered voters in June 2026. Asked what they would most want corporate leaders to do differently, 23% – close to one in four – chose the option that executives should “share their wealth, earn less and stop being greedy.”
It is worth being precise about what that figure represents. This was a survey of registered voters, not a scientific readout of every American, and “stop being greedy” was one of the answer choices offered rather than language respondents volunteered on their own. Even with those caveats, when nearly a quarter of voters pick “earn less” from a menu of options, it says something real about how the public views the people at the very top of the corporate ladder.
A 275-to-1 Pay Gap
The context behind that sentiment is stark. The average chief executive of an S&P 500 company took home about $17.7 million in 2025, according to figures reported by CBS News – a raise of roughly 6% over the year before. The typical full-time American worker, by comparison, earned $64,220. Run the numbers and the ratio comes out to about 275 to 1.
Put another way, the person at the top of a major corporation now earns in a single year what it would take an ordinary employee nearly three centuries to make. And that gap has been widening for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, chief executives typically earned somewhere around 20 to 30 times what their workers did. The explosion of executive compensation – driven heavily by stock awards and bonuses tied to share prices – has turned a modest gap into a canyon.
Two Sides of the Debate
Defenders of high executive pay make a familiar case. They argue that running a multibillion-dollar company is enormously demanding, that top talent is scarce and mobile, and that tying a CEO’s fortune to the company’s stock keeps their interests aligned with shareholders. Cut the pay, they warn, and the best leaders will simply take their skills elsewhere.
Critics see it very differently. They note that worker productivity has climbed for years while wages have largely stagnated, and that the same boards signing off on eight-figure pay packages often resist even modest raises for the people who actually build the products and serve the customers. When a company announces layoffs in the same quarter its CEO collects a raise, the survey’s “stop being greedy” option starts to feel less like an insult and more like a plain description of events.
Shareholders themselves have grown more willing to push back. Non-binding “say on pay” votes at annual meetings have become a regular venue for investors to register discomfort with runaway compensation, even if boards are not required to act on the results.
What This Means for Americans
For most families, this is not an abstract debate about corporate governance. It is the difference between a paycheck that keeps pace with rent and groceries and one that quietly falls behind. When executive compensation climbs 6% in a year and the typical worker’s wages barely move, the message a lot of people hear is that the economy is being run for the handful at the top. The new survey suggests a growing share of voters are paying attention – and that they want the balance to shift.
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