Chubb, Allstate, AIG CEOs join health insurers at top of 2021 pay ratio list

Several major property and casualty and multiline insurers surged into the ranks of U.S. carriers with the biggest gaps between CEO and median employee pay in 2021, ending health insurers' dominance at the top of the table.

Managed care providers still featured prominently in the top five as Elevance Health Inc. had the largest CEO-to-employee pay ratio in 2021 among the top 20 listed U.S. insurers, an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis shows. CEO Gail Boudreaux was paid 379x the median employee compensation, as a 13% pay raise for the top executive coincided with a 17.1% drop in median employee remuneration. UnitedHealth Group Inc. finished in the fifth position on this list.

Chubb Ltd., The Allstate Corp. and American International Group Inc. took positions two, three and four, respectively. Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg's pay ratio grew to 322.4x median employee pay, mainly driven by a 14% increase in his compensation.

Allstate CEO Tom Wilson took home 306x median employee compensation in 2021. While Wilson's pay package shrank by almost 10% year over year, Allstate's median employee compensation fell faster, dropping 39%. As a result, Allstate recorded the second-biggest percentage increase in CEO pay ratio at 48.5%.

AIG's Peter Zaffino was paid 305x the median employee rate in 2021. His 2021 annualized compensation was 16.5% higher than that of predecessor Brian Duperreault in 2020, trumping a 1.4% rise in median worker pay at the multiline insurer. Zaffino took over from Duperreault on March 1, 2021.

Another P&C insurer, Cincinnati Financial Corp., recorded the largest increase in CEO-to-employee pay ratio in this analysis at 61.4%. CEO Steven Johnston was paid 61.5x the company's median employee pay as his remuneration rose 69%, while median employee compensation increased by a far lower 4.67%.

The changes in the top five come against what was a generally widening gap between CEO and typical employee pay across the largest listed insurers in the U.S. in 2021. Elevance's CEO-to-employee pay ratio of 379x beat 2020's top ratio of 362x, recorded by Centene Corp., and pay ratios increased for 15 of the top 20 publicly traded insurers. There was a fall in median employee salary at eight of these companies.

Even Berkshire Hathaway Inc., whose CEO pay ratio is consistently the lowest of the top 20 because of Warren Buffett's small pay package, by U.S. insurance CEO standards, reported an increase of 14.2%, driven by a drop in median employee salary.

However, median employee pay did jump for some carriers. The biggest increase was at The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., where median employee pay climbed 15.4%. UnitedHealth Group was in second place on this measure with a 10.2% increase.

Some pay ratios actually shrank considerably in 2021. Aflac Inc., in second place in 2020, saw its ratio fall 32.4% to 240x, driven mainly by a 30% decline in CEO Dan Amos's pay. Centene's CEO pay ratio, 2020's largest, fell 19.9%, again largely because of a drop in then-CEO Michael Neidorff's compensation.