Ibex Executives Hold Back on Salary Increases Despite Record Results

Major Ibex-35 groups are slowing down the trend that had led their top executives to significantly widen the gap between their salaries and the performance of the companies they manage.

The presidents or CEOs of the companies that make up the index (except ArcelorMittal) earned a total of €145.89 million in 2024, a 0.27% increase, in a year when they could have been much more generous with their remuneration, considering the record profits reported to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) during the period.

Specifically, that figure rose by 10.8% in a very complex environment due to the pressure from rising costs, geopolitical tensions, and the drop in interest rates affecting key market sectors such as banking.

Despite this scenario, financial institutions were precisely the protagonists of gains in the Spanish stock market in 2024, as well as the tourism sector—boosted by consecutive records of visitors—and, above all, the record accounts of giants like Iberdrola or Ferrovial, greatly benefited by extraordinary gains from asset sales.

In this context, the remuneration data for executives (fixed and bonuses) imply that, on average, each of them earned €4.17 million, with notable differences among them and considering that some compensations include severance payments.

The figures range from the €14.2 million earned by Ignacio Galán at the helm of Iberdrola—or the €13.7 million by Ana Botín at Banco Santander—to the €677,000 earned by Isidro Rubiales in his first full year as CEO of Unicaja.

Alongside them, only Óscar García Maceiras, CEO of Inditex, surpassed the €10 million mark last year. This represents an 8.6% increase from the previous year, following unprecedented results for the textile giant, which reached €7.577 billion in consolidated terms, a 10.3% increase.

In any case, the evolution of executive salaries remains far from that of the workforce, where the average salary is around €61,000 (including items such as social security contributions, which account for a third of the gross salary). This year is also distorted by the decline seen in companies like Telefónica, where 2024 compares with a 2023 in which personnel expense data were higher and extraordinary, coinciding with the ERE of that year.

With that exception, the figures reveal that, in general, the gap between top executives and their workers is still very large. An Ibex-35 executive earns on average 67 times more than one of their employees. Another fact: that top executive would take only 5.46 days to earn the salary that a worker receives throughout the year.

Although the differences between the leaders of the Ibex 35 and their employees are striking, so are those between the latter and the rest of the national labour market. The thirty listed companies employ over a million people in Spain, who earn on average four times more than the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI) and twice the average salary in Spain. "Comparisons are odious," the saying goes, but it is a phrase that many workers also think when comparing their salaries with 'others' in the Ibex. Because it is not the same to work for IAG as for Inmobiliaria Colonial, where the greatest difference between their workforces is recorded: €88,000.

In a year of wide margins and historic results, the salaries of senior management have barely moved, as if time had stood still at the top while everything else changed. Even so, the distance between those who make the decisions and those who execute them remains, as constant as it is visible. And in that space, each figure not only reflects a salary policy but also a way of understanding the value of work within large companies.