Prepping for Proxy Statement Data

The 2025 earnings season is now over, which means the 2025 proxy season is about to begin. For those analysts and institutional investors who enjoy sifting through proxy data, let’s do a quick review of the data Calcbench can bring to your fingertips.

For starters, you can find proxy statements for the companies you follow on our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page. Simply go to the pull-down menu on the left side of your screen, select “Proxy” from the list of choices, and the document appears. See Figure 1, below, for an example featuring Boeing ($BA).



What’s in the Proxy?

Proxy statements are most famous for their data about executive compensation. This is where you can see how much a company’s top executives were paid, broken down by salary, bonus, stock awards, perks, “other” compensation, and the like. Typically a company discloses compensation for the CEO, CFO, and several other “named executive officers,” or NEOs.


Because these disclosures are tagged, Calcbench users can also find them in quick table form for one or more companies via our Multi-Company page. 


For example, Figure 2, below, shows total compensation for the CEO, CFO, and even the board of directors (yes, we track that too) for several large firms that have already filed their 2025 proxies.



You can also look at compensation trends over time with a simple time-series pull, by clicking on that small clock icon you see at the top of the column of data you’ve pulled. 


The chart below shows trends in average CEO and CFO total compensation for the S&P 500 for 2020 through 2024. (We excluded 2025 because not enough companies have filed their 2025 proxies yet for apples-to-apples comparison.) 



Surprising exactly nobody, CEOs are paid more handsomely than CFOs; although it’s interesting to see the surge in total compensation in 2021, followed by a dip in 2022. Presumably that’s because a significant amount of CEOs’ total compensation comes from equity grants, the value of which can fluctuate with the stock market. 

Other Compensation and Proxy Data

Proxy statements are also famous for disclosures about audit fees. Specifically, companies report:


  • Audit fees;

  • “Audit-related” fees;

  • Tax-related fees; and

  • Other audit fees.


Again, you can find those disclosures by searching either the proxy statement itself on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page or the Multi-Company page (where you can search many companies at once and export all the data into Excel). 


Subscribers can also research new pay versus performance disclosures that became mandatory last year; we had a whole post on the issue last fall researching how to find and study those numbers. And don’t forget our interview with financial analyst and adviser Stephen O’Byrne last year, who walked through how analysts can study executive compensation data. 


O’Byrne even contributed a guest post comparing the compensation incentives for the CEOs at Pfizer ($PFE) and Verizon ($VZ), where he concluded that Verizon’s CEO had less incentive to support the share price — and shortly thereafter, Verizon changed CEOs. 


So yes, you can indeed gain a lot of insight by studying proxy statement data; and as always, Calcbench has that data in spades.

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