2025 Top 250 Report

The 53rd edition of the Top 250 Report explores executive long-term incentive practices at the 250 largest companies by market capitalization, with an emphasis on how prolonged 5-year market volatility and uncertainty has influenced and shaped plan design and structure. Current trends in long-term incentive design are centered on de-risking of programs, mitigating the challenges of multi-year financial goal setting, and providing downside protection, if needed, to ensure plans are durable during times of considerable disruption. Key findings from this year’s study include the following:

• Use of stock options / SARs continues to decline, with only 44% of companies granting appreciation awards as part of LTI programs (down from 50% in 2020)
• The number of metrics used to evaluate long-term performance has increased to avoid overreliance on a single metric and reduce the risk of all-or-nothing outcomes
• To address the challenges of cumulative multi-year goal-setting in a volatile market environment, companies are setting a wider threshold to maximum range around target goals 
• Some companies are shifting the way “long-term” performance is measured by evaluating shorter-term or multi-period achievements within the overall measurement period
• TSR has been the most used measure in LTI plans over the past 10 years, and prevalence continues to increase
• An increasing number of companies are using TSR measures to modify award payouts rather than as a discrete metric