Brian Niccol's $97.8 million compensation dwarfs the median Starbucks employee's $14,674, but the gap looks different at every chain
Kevin Sullivan / Digital First Media / Orange County Register via Getty Images
At 6,666 to 1, the ratio of CEO Brian Niccol's compensation to that of the median Starbucks $SBUX employee was the widest at any company in the S&P 500, according to the AFL-CIO's 2025 Executive Paywatch report. The number is not a typo. Starbucks annualized Niccol's base salary and bonus for calculating his 2024 pay ratio total compensation of $96 million. The typical Starbucks worker's pay was $14,674.
That figure sits below the federal poverty line for an individual. Starbucks noted in its SEC filing that its typical worker is a part-time barista in the U.S. and that many of its employees work in part-time, flexible positions, which has the effect of lowering the compensation level of its median employee. The calculation also includes the company's global workforce of about 361,000 staffers, not just the roughly 210,000 U.S.-based workers.
Even accounting for those caveats, the gap places Starbucks in a category of its own. The question is how this compares with the rest of the food service industry, and what the comparison reveals.
Starbucks told Quartz that its "pay and benefits average approximately $30 per hour for hourly partners. This includes benefits like comprehensive healthcare, equity in the form of stock, and 100% tuition coverage through the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, which are all available even when partners work part-time at just 20 hours or more per week."
"During Q2, we announced new ways for partners to share in our success," the company said. "We announced we’d shift to weekly pay and introduce a new quarterly reward program for baristas and shift supervisors, recognizing coffeehouse teams for strong performance across sales, operations and customer service. These investments are all focused on creating an experience that’s more consistent, welcoming and human."
Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Act, publicly traded corporations are required to disclose the ratio between the median worker pay and respective CEO pay in their proxy statements. That rule, adopted by the SEC in 2015, has created a public ledger of pay inequality across corporate America.
Among major food service companies, Starbucks leads by a factor of four or more. At Yum Brands $YUM, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, the median worker was identified as a part-time Taco Bell restaurant employee in the U.S. who made $17,160, while CEO David Gibbs received $24.7 million in compensation, for a pay ratio of 1,440 to 1, according to Restaurant Dive.
Chipotle $CMG disclosed a CEO pay ratio of 1,148 to 1 for the fiscal year ending in 2024, according to the company's proxy statement, as compiled by the AFL-CIO. In Niccol's last full year at the burrito chain, he earned $22.47 million, compared to the $16,595 earned by an hourly Florida employee who worked 24 hours weekly, according to Restaurant Dive.
McDonald's $MCD system is majority franchised, and as a result, the brand identified its median employee not as a worker in the U.S. but as a restaurant employee in Poland, earning $17,492 in 2024. CEO Chris Kempczinski was paid about $18.2 million, or about 1,014 times what the median employee earned.
For contrast, consider Costco $COST. According to Costco's 2024 proxy statement, CEO Ron Vachris received $12.2 million in total compensation, translating to a 262:1 pay ratio between him and the median employee. The median Costco employee earned $47,092, according to the proxy. Costco is not a restaurant company, but its retail workforce and the comparison illustrate what the ratios look like when median pay sits closer to a living wage.
Comparing CEO pay ratios across food service companies is instructive, but the numbers do not always measure the same thing. The disclosures are shaped by each company's business model, workforce composition, and geographic footprint.
Fast food giants like Restaurant Brands $QSR International, Yum Brands, and McDonald's have heavily franchised store systems, meaning they have a higher ratio of corporate employees to frontline workers. When a company franchises most of its locations, the workers making sandwiches or pouring coffee do not appear on the parent company's payroll. That can make the median employee a better-paid corporate or international staffer, or, in McDonald's case, a worker in Poland.
Starbucks follows a company-operated model, where company-operated stores play a critical role in the company's long-term strategy, compared to McDonald's heavily franchised model. This means Starbucks carries hundreds of thousands of baristas on its books, pulling its median pay down. The company has acknowledged this directly: Starbucks said it employs over 340,000 partners in over 15,000 company-operated stores, and that partners frequently work in flexible, part-time roles, which has the effect of lowering the annual total compensation for its median employee.
The structure of CEO packages also matters. Niccol's compensation for 2024 included a $5 million sign-on bonus and a $90 million stock grant. Starbucks designed those awards to replace the equity Niccol forfeited at Chipotle, making the first-year figure an outlier relative to what his ongoing compensation is likely to be. Even at $31 million, his compensation for 2025, the ratio to median employee pay would remain above 2,000 to 1.
Starbucks is not an outlier in the direction of the trend. It is an outlier in magnitude. According to the AFL-CIO, CEOs at the nation's 500 largest public companies took home $18.9 million last year, or 285 times as much as the typical U.S. worker's paycheck of $49,500, up from a ratio of 268 to 1 a year earlier.
At the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay, which the Institute for Policy Studies calls the "Low-Wage 100," average CEO compensation rose 34.7% between 2019 and 2024, more than double the 16.3% increase in median worker pay. U.S. inflation over that period was 22.6%, meaning real wages at these firms declined, according to the IPS Executive Excess 2025 report. The average CEO-worker pay ratio of Low-Wage 100 firms widened from 560 to 1 in 2019 to 632 to 1 in 2024.
Data from the Economic Policy Institute shows this trajectory in longer relief: CEOs of major U.S. companies earned 21 times as much as the typical worker in 1965. This ratio grew to 31 to 1 in 1978 and 61 to 1 by 1989, according to the Economic Policy Institute. From 1978 to 2023, top CEO compensation rose 1,085%, compared with a 24% increase in a typical worker's compensation. By 2023, CEOs were paid 290 times as much as a typical worker.
Starbucks boosted median worker pay by only 4.2% in real terms during the six-year period from 2019 to 2024, while spending $18.2 billion on stock buybacks, according to the IPS report.
Management guru Peter Drucker once argued that "no executive should make more than 20 times the compensation of their workers," and added in a 1998 interview that "a 20-to-1 salary ratio is the limit beyond which they cannot go if they don't want resentment and falling morale". Every major food service company now exceeds that threshold by a long shot.
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