250 CEOs Confessed Their Pay. Half Earn Less Than Employees (Research Backed)

0:00Ask somebody what their company makes and they'll tell you revenue, margins, growth rate, probably before you even finish the question. They know it like the back of their hand, but ask them what they personally take home and suddenly everyone gets super, super quiet and uncomfortable. So Hampton asked anonymously. In late August, 2026, 250 founders and CEOs completed a compensation survey. And this survey wasn't just like, what's your salary? We asked what their companies make, whether they're bootstrapped or venture backed, what they pay themselves in base salary, what they take on top of salary and what they pay senior people in operations, sales, marketing, product, tech, and HR.

0:34We also asked about bonuses, equity and profit sharing, full-time employees versus contractors, and a lot of other weird stuff that you don't typically see on W-2s. And before I show you any of this, there's a little nerdy note that I have to add. The raw report actually has 296 records. 46 are incomplete. In this video, I'm going to go over the data from 250 completed surveys. Most of the money questions were also answered in ranges, like$100 ,000 to$200 ,000 or$200 ,000 to$300 ,000, that type of thing. So not always exact dollar amounts, but the findings are really cool. So whenever I compare two ranges or give an estimated median, I'm using the midpoint of that range.

1:11Translation, this is a really useful benchmark. This video is not an audit of 250 tax returns, and this isn't a random survey of every entrepreneur in America. It's a Hampton sample. Hampton is a vetted community for founders and CEOs, and on average, they're doing 25 million in revenue. To qualify to be a Hampton member, you have to have at least$3 million in revenue, 3 million raised, or a previous exit of over$10 million. So again, this survey is not what every founder in America makes. It's a very specific survey of 250 people in Hampton, the private community for founders and CEOs. And this is what this particular group of founders and CEOs told us.

1:48Because a lot of this stuff is anonymous, I've grouped it into five private themes. When I name somebody in this video, it's because they've already told their story publicly. Okay, so now we can actually talk about the money. The first thing that jumped out about the survey is how normal founder salaries look even when the businesses stop looking normal. For companies below$10 million in annual revenue, the midpoint of the median founder salary band is about$150 ,000. At 30 to 50 million in revenue, it's about 400 ,000. That's a pretty big raise. But think about what happened to the company compared to what happened to the paycheck.

2:19Revenue can go up by tens of millions of dollars while founders' salaries still sitting in a pretty normal executive range. And a lot of founders are not even the best-paid person in the building. Now, because these answers are ranges, I can't tell you down to the exact dollar, but if I use the midpoint of each salary band and only look at respondents who gave us at least one senior employee pay range, about 47 % appear to pay at least one functional leader more than their own based salary. In other words, almost half of these companies we surveyed are paying their senior employees more than their CEO or founder.

2:49For companies doing under a million in revenue, it's 13 out of 15 usable responses. That's about 87%. Even above$20 million in revenue, it's about 35%. And there's a lot of older research that backs this up as well. Noam Wasserman studied more than 1 ,200 executives at 528 private companies and found a meaningful compensation difference between founders and non-founders. His paper literally calls it the founder discount. And that difference gets smaller as the companies grow. Then a guy named Barton Hamilton looked at self-employment from a different angle. His research found that people who stayed in business for 10 years had a median earnings differential of about 35 % compared with paid employment.

3:29Now, does that mean all these founders should go quit and get a real job? Probably not. Owners have equity. They get distributions. They can sell the company. But that's exactly the point. Salary by itself is a terrible way to answer the question, how much does this founder make? Take guys like Josh Payne. He bootstrapped StatCommerce and eventually sold it for about$80 million. dollars. He publicly talks about paying himself zero dollars at first, then 60 grand, then 75 grand, then 90, then around 150, and eventually before the sale, around$250 ,000 plus bonuses. The business was getting much bigger long before his salary looked like it.

4:03So if you're looking at salary and thinking, this seems weirdly low for the size of this company, you might actually be right. But salary is only layer one. And this is where the survey gets a lot more interesting. 15 of these 250 respondents report a base salary of$0. But six of those 15 also report at least$500 ,000 in additional compensation. And I'm purposely being sort of annoyingly deliberate with that phrase, additional compensation. What we didn't ask in the survey is how much did you take in distributions? What we did ask is how much you take on top of your base salary. And that could include distributions or bonuses, profit sharing, or other owner economics.

4:41The part of the survey that really stuck out to me was that there's a very clear differential between the companies who are funded and the companies who are bootstrapped. There are 180 bootstrapped or self-funded respondents of the 250. 70 of them, so 39%, report at least half a million dollars in additional compensation. That's almost 4 in 10. Now, let's compare that with the venture-backed group. And here, I'm defining venture-backed as seed through Series C. That group is 58 respondents. 53 of those 58 report less than$100 ,000 in additional compensation. And the other five are still below$300 ,000.

5:17Not one in the venture-backed group reports more than$300 ,000 in additional compensation. That is a massive difference. And it gives you a much better way to think about founder pay. A bootstrapped founder can build a company that throws off cash to the owner right now. Whereas a venture-backed founder is usually playing a completely different type of entrepreneurial builders game. VC-backed founders have salary now and equity value later, or so they hope. You can see the same general shape in current outside payroll data. Cruise Consulting's 2026 data from U.S. venture-backed startups puts the median CEO salary at about$159 ,000.

5:56Seed CEOs average around$153 ,000. Series A, about$203 ,000. Series B, about$216 ,000. So when you see a venture founder running a valuable company on 200 grand salaries, that isn't necessarily weird according to the data, because the paycheck is really only half the bet for these founders. The other half is them betting on the cap table, them betting on themselves, and them betting on the future exit opportunity of the company that they are the founder of. And this is why founder compensation is really broken into two entirely different systems. I ask every guest on this show what their net worth is.

6:28Most of them have to think about it. And it's not because they're hiding something. It's because their money is in dozens of different places. Two brokerages, a business account, some real estate, a crypto wallet they forgot about, a syndicate, and so much more. But we know that personal finance really is not that simple. Sylvia fixes that. Sylvia is an AI built for one very specific and important job, managing your money. You connect your bank accounts, your brokerage, your credit cards, your crypto. You add your real estate and whatever else you own. And now it knows your entire financial picture.

6:59And you can just ask it questions in plain English like, should I refinance? Or how do I lower my tax rate? Or what's actually risky in my portfolio? Or you can ask, what's the smartest way to pass this to my kids? You could ask ChatGPT those questions, but ChatGPT doesn't know what you own. It also isn't trained on personal finance. Sylvia is. In accuracy tests on tax, mortgages, and credit cards, it beat ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. In all three categories, Sylvia won. The more complicated your money is, the better Sylvia gets. Their data shows people who use Sylvia regularly grow their network faster than people who don't.

7:40And this is the case at every income level and net worth bracket. Go to Sylvia.com, connect to your accounts, ask it the question you've been avoiding, and start understanding your personal finance more accurately than you ever have. One system is designed to pay you while you own the company. and the other is trying to pay you when the ownership becomes liquid. And if you benchmark one against the other, you can make yourself feel either wildly underpaid or wildly overpaid for no real good reason. Now let's talk about how taxes come into play here. Whenever founders talk about salary versus distributions, somebody eventually says, just make your salary tiny and take the rest of distributions.

8:18That's not a great rule and it's probably a viral TikTok somewhere that someone's heard about and hasn't actually done the research on. So I did it for you. For an S corporation, the IRS says a shareholder employee who actually works in the business has to receive reasonable compensation for those services before taking non-wage distributions. Oh, that was a mouthful. And the IRS can reclassify distributions as wages when the salary isn't reasonable. Let's take a guy, David Watson. He was an accountant. His S corporation paid him$24 ,000 a year in wages while also paying him much larger distribution.

8:53The IRS actually challenged it. The case went through courts, the Eighth Circuit upheld the government's position on reasonable compensation, and it was a whole mess. So the useful question to ask your founder is not what's the lowest salary you can get away with, but what salary could I defend for the work you're actually doing? The IRS itself points to things like your training and experience, your duties, how much time you spend in the business, what comparable companies pay, and what you pay non-shareholder employees. But there's still another reason not to mindlessly shove salary towards zero.

9:25If you're an S-Corp shareholder, distributions don't count as earned compensation for retirement plan contributions. So your ability to contribute through your company's retirement plan is tied to W-2 compensation and the actual plan's rules. For 2026, the overall annual additions limit for a 401k is$72 ,000 before applicable catch-up contributions. But don't hear$72 ,000 and decide that everyone should automatically dump 72 grand into their 401k. compensation plan design age and other rules do matter so yes structure matters a lot but it really comes down to the ceo or founder needs to be paid a reasonable salary they should have clean records there should be a cpa who understands your company's entity and you should treat distributions as actual distributions at the end of the day boring is really good when the alternative is explaining your creativity to the irs also this is not tax advice beyond salary there's a bunch of stuff that founders don't really mentally put in the salary bucket in our survey we had a free text response where a lot of people mentioned things about unusual compensation roughly a third mentioned credit card points rewards or closely related card benefits depending on how narrowly you code the answers other things like vehicles show up repeatedly and so do things like real estate related arrangements things like new houses or different property that they bought as compensation what's so interesting about all this is that founders can have a lot of economic value flowing through their lives that never really show up when someone asks them, what is your salary?

10:52I think points are the perfect example. They feel like monopoly money right up until you buy something actually tangible with them. Federal Reserve researchers have found that rewards card systems create meaningful transfers between different groups of consumers. One Fed analysis estimated roughly$15 billion a year in redistribution associated with rewards credit cards. So credit card points are not like imaginary monopoly money, but that also doesn't mean that every business card reward is automatically a tax-free personal compensation. The facts matter, especially to the IRS, and how the reward was earned matters.

11:26How it was redeemed can even matter. And that's a CPA question, not a Daniel Burke on Money Wise question. So talk to your tax advisor. For this survey, I think the useful takeaway is a little bit simpler. When you're figuring out what the business is really doing for you financially, don't stop at the payroll. Salary is the number your payroll software knows, but compensation is the number your lifestyle knows. Our survey also asked what the senior team typically makes. The most commonly reported senior function is operations. After that was product and engineering, sales, marketing, tech, and then finally HR.

11:56And somewhat not surprisingly, sales is the highest paid functional leader by median compensation band in this example and in this survey. And the lowest was HR. In fact, among respondents who reported compensation for an HR leader, nobody put that person in the$400 ,000 plus band. Then there's a company-wide bonus that a lot of people reported on. Below$1 million in revenue, only one of 20 respondents say the company pays one at all, only 5 % of the companies. But once you get above a million in revenue, it was 100 out of 250, so 44%. It feels like a meaningful threshold. It's not because$1 million is a magic number, but because you need economic room before where a company-wide bonus becomes a repeatable compensation system instead of this random promise that you made a bunch of people and had to deliver good on.

12:42And beyond that, there's stuff like equity. In the bootstrapped companies, there's an interesting association between very high estimated founder cash compensation and lower likelihood that the C-suite gets traditional equity. A large NBER research project used surveys from more than 40 ,000 employees to study employee ownership, profit sharing, and stock options. The strongest results showed up when shared upside was combined with things like good workplace practices and fixed wages that were already at or above market. Put simply, equity isn't a coupon code for underpaying someone, and there's still another study that founders should know about.

13:16Researchers studying University of California employees randomly made some workers more likely to look up co-workers' salaries. The people who found out they were below the median for comparable peers reported lower job satisfaction and more interest in finding another job. The people above the median didn't get an equal and opposite happiness boost, which to me is a very human result. It sounds like exactly what I'd expect. People don't judge their compensation in a vacuum. What they're usually asking is compared with who? How much money do I make compared with this person who maybe I feel equal to or peers with?

13:49So my read on this data point is that you should benchmark the job, pay the job, pay a reasonable salary for what that person is completing with their job, and then decide how much upside you want that person to share in with the company. So at this point in the video, you can watch this whole thing and conclude that the goal is to extract as much cash as legally possible. But I don't really think that's the lesson. I think there's a better question. What are you as a founder optimizing for? A bootstrapped founder may want durable cash flow and control of the company. And a VC-backed founder may willingly take less cash because the bet is concentrated in future equity opportunity.

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15:21Click the link in the description or go to dailybodycoach.com slash moneywise and I'll connect you directly with Anthony. Robert Hall and Susan Woodward studied that latter model, venture-backed entrepreneurship, and they described the basic deal pretty bluntly. The entrepreneur takes a below-market salary, owns a big piece of the company, and carries a huge amount of company-specific risk. In one of their models, using a particular assumption about risk aversion, an entrepreneur beginning with less than about$700 ,000 in wealth would have preferred the certainty equivalent economics of a salaried job.

15:53And$700 ,000 is not a rule in this case, it's just one of their median findings. But the point behind this is super important. I own a lot of equity is not at all the same thing as I am financially secure. There's a psychological reason founders should care about this. There's a famous science study involving sugarcane farmers in India. They get a big chunk of their income around harvest, and researchers tested the same farmers before harvest when money was tight and afterward when they'd been paid. The same people performed better on cognitive tests after the harvest. The argument from the researchers is that financial scarcity itself consumes mental bandwidth.

16:28Look, I'm very obviously not saying an underpaid founder is living in poverty. So that's not the comparison. The point is personal financial pressure can change the way decisions feel or even the way decisions are made for founders. And that matters so much when the questions are, do I raise or do I sell or do I take this deal or do I keep going? Am I making the best decision for the company? Or am I just tired of feeling personally broke? Andrew Wilkinson has talked publicly about taking almost the opposite approach. He paid himself very well early in his business and argues that founders who starve themselves can become desperate for liquidity and start treating a sale as the only way to finally get paid.

17:06You don't have to copy this philosophy, but I think the principle is super smart. Founder compensation should buy you enough personal stability that you can make company decisions for company reasons, not because you can't pay your own rent. Still, on the other side, don't let your lifestyle become so expensive that you can never afford to stop. So what do you take away from this video? Here's the exact exercise that I would do if you're a founder listening to this and think, what does this mean for me? Take last year. Start with your W-2 salary. Add distributions, bonuses, profit sharing, any other cash you actually took from the business.

17:37Then, separately, list the legitimate economic benefits the business provides that you would otherwise pay for yourself. Now, tally up the total. That number is much more useful than your salary. Now ask three questions. Is my salary defensible for the job that I actually do? Is my total compensation appropriate for the company I actually own? Finally, is the way I'm paying myself helping me make better long-term decisions or is it forcing my hands to make decisions I'm forced to make because I don't make the right amount of money? What's clear to me about the survey is that the richest looking company does not always have the highest paid founder And the founder with the smallest salary is not necessarily taking home the least money.

18:18And the most shocking thing to me about the survey was how bootstrapped and venture-backed founders are playing entirely different compensation models with their companies. So obviously don't take all this data and then go copy what you're hearing other companies are doing, but like figure out what compensation model your company should do and what makes the most sense for you as a founder. All the data points and methodologies noted in this video are going to be linked in the description. And if this is the type of conversation that is helpful to listen to or that you want to actually be in the room with other founders and CEOs to talk about, go check out joinhampton.com.

18:49It's an incredible community of high growth founders and CEOs on average doing like$25 million. They all talk about this type of stuff with their core groups. A core group is a group of seven other people. So eight people in a room with a moderator and you discuss life and family and business and numbers and what the actual bottlenecks are and the way that you're growing your company. It's an amazing group and I highly recommend checking out again. That's joinhampton.com if you made it this far I super appreciate you listening to money wise Please go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and if you love this give us a comment If you hate it comments as well.

19:23Tell me why how can I improve? I really appreciate all the listeners that come back week after week and if that's you Thank you again for supporting me and for supporting money wise by hampton. We'll see you next week