CEO Salary in Perspective: PayScale

It is easy to agree that CEOs have a tough job, but does a huge CEO salary really accurately reflect the job they do?

By Aubrey Bach, PayScale.com

Nobody thinks being the CEO of a huge company is an easy job, so it makes sense that these bigwigs get big salary paychecks for their hard work.

But when you compare the salary of some CEOs to what their average workers earn, the difference can be a little mind-boggling. PayScale just published a newly updated comparison of the salaries of CEOs at the largest companies in the United States to those of their workers.

The difference in ratios is pretty epic. Wal-Mart tops the list, with CEO Mike Duke earning 1,034 times what the average Wal-Mart employee makes.

Compare that to Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who takes home a paltry $490,000 a year, only nine times the salary of one of his average employees, or Google CEO , who only takes a salary of $1 per year. (It should be noted that stock compensation wasn’t figured into our CEO salary data.) These two companies also have employees that report higher job satisfaction.

So take a look at this infographic to see which Big Corporate Kahunas are riding high on the highest salary ratios, and who reports earnings more in tune with their employees. And keep your eyes peeled for future posts about this subject. In the next week or so, we’ll dig into the nuances of how we define CEO Salary and highlight CEOs with the best and worst reputations throughout history.

Infographic after the jump…