84% of Americans Want CEO Pay Gaps Fixed — Only 15% Say Companies Deliver

Only 15% of Americans believe companies are doing a good job of reining in the gap between CEO and worker pay — while 84% say keeping that gap small matters to them. That's the headline finding of a new confidence survey from Bentley University and Gallup, released this month, and it's a brutal report card for corporate America on an issue that won't go away.

The pattern repeats on ethics. Fully 97% of Americans say it's important for business to make money in an ethical way, yet just 32% believe businesses are actually accomplishing that. Roughly translated: nearly everyone expects ethical profit, and barely one in three thinks they're seeing it.

How wide is the gap when the boss makes bank?

The numbers behind that public frustration come into focus with fresh data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). CEO pay at the top 350 U.S. firms rose 14% in 2025 — and that figure excludes Elon Musk's extraordinary compensation package at Tesla, meaning the underlying trend isn't distorted by a single outlier.

At those firms, CEOs made 325 times as much as the average employee. Put another way, a typical worker would need more than three centuries of annual pay to match what their chief executive collects in one year.

EPI's data points to a structural driver: executive compensation is increasingly tied to stock prices and company valuations, while workers' wages have grown comparatively slower over the last decade. When the market climbs, the top of the house captures the gains faster than everyone below it.

What does this change for practitioners?

For compensation committees, HR leaders and investor-relations teams, the survey is a warning about trust, not just optics. The public isn't asking whether companies can pay their CEOs well — 84% acceptance of meaningful pay differences makes that clear. The issue is execution: Americans see the gap widening at 325-to-1 and rate the response as inadequate by a margin of more than five to one.

That credibility deficit lands in a specific context. Despite the low marks on pay gaps and ethics, Americans still trust businesses more than leaders in Washington when it comes to decision-making and impact — a relative advantage companies are currently enjoying but could easily squander.

Businesses still beat Washington — for now

The government's numbers are falling fast. Last year, 51% of U.S. adults said the federal government was effective at making a positive impact on people's lives. This year that figure dropped eight percentage points, to 43%.

The gap between expectation and performance is even starker inside the survey's findings on Washington: there is a 49-point gap between Americans who think the federal government has great potential to make a difference and those who think it is effective at actually doing so.

That's the paradox corporate leaders should sit with. Americans approve of businesses' ability to make productive decisions compared to the federal government — that's a competitive edge no marketing budget can buy. But the same respondents expect certain ethical practices in return, and on pay fairness, 85% of the country currently says companies are falling short.

The forward question is whether that goodwill survives another year of double-digit CEO pay growth. EPI's 14% figure suggests the trend is accelerating, not stabilizing, which means the 15% approval rating on pay-gap handling has room to fall further — unless boards start treating compensation structure as a trust decision rather than a market benchmark.