Insights
Research Report
2025 Top 250 Annual Incentive Plan Report
Research Report | By Warren Suh, Ezra Womark, Rachel Gibbons
FW Cook’s 2025 Annual Incentive Plan Report provides a comprehensive review of the annual incentive plans of the top 250 largest companies in the S&P 500 by market capitalization. This report examines trends in financial and non-financial metrics, goal-setting practices, and actual payouts, comparing findings over the past 3-year and 6-year periods.
Key Highlights:
- Plan Types: Formulaic annual incentive plan design with predetermined metrics and weightings remains the chosen approach by 93% of companies, aligning with shareholder and proxy advisor preferences
- Financial Measures: Profit and revenue measures are the most prevalent and tend to account for the greatest weighting
- Non-Financial Measures: A non-financial component is highly prevalent in annual incentive plans as a complement to core financial measures, with 80% of companies using a non-financial measure
- Goal-Setting: Most companies continue to set more challenging target goals relative to prior year’s actual results
Warren Suh
Consultant
Warren Suh consults on all aspects of executive compensation, non-employee director compensation, corporate governance, compliance, disclosure and conducts value added analyses.
Ezra Womark
Consultant
Ezra Womark works with a diverse range of organizations, including national nonprofits, emerging companies, and Fortune 500 corporations, advising on executive and director compensation. He helps clients design and evaluate programs that attract, retain, and motivate leadership while aligning pay practices with organizational strategy and performance.
Rachel Gibbons
Principal
Rachel Gibbons works with companies across a variety of industries, sizes, and stages of growth, from IPO planning and public company readiness initiatives to mature company compensation advisory work. She specializes in short- and long-term incentive plan design and executive and director compensation benchmarking.
Additional Publications
By Rachel Gibbons
October 20, 2025
2025 Top 250 Annual Incentive Plan Report
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February 20, 2025
Post-Election Incentive Pay Planning
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December 9, 2022
2022 Use of Environmental, Social, and Governance Measures in Incentive Plans
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September 30, 2022
Incentive Pay in Uncertain Times
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February 22, 2021
ISS ESG Releases Updates to Governance “QualityScore” Model
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