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How many lifetimes to earn a top Georgia CEOs’ 2016 pay?

A typical metro Atlanta family would have to work more than 600 years to match the 2016 pay of Georgia’s highest-paid chief executive, FleetCor Technologies CEO Ronald Clarke. How many lifetimes would you have to work? Try our pay calculator and see.

Credit: HANDOUT

Credit: HANDOUT

A typical metro Atlanta family would have to work more than 600 years to match the 2016 pay of Georgia’s highest-paid chief executive, FleetCor Technologies CEO Ronald Clarke. How many lifetimes would you have to work? Try our pay calculator and see.
By Russell Grantham, and John Perry
July 10, 2017

Assuming you start working when you turn 21 and stop just before your 65th birthday, we calculate how many working lifetimes it would take to earn the equivalent of just one year's total pre-tax pay for the chief executive officers of Georgia's top publicly-traded companies.

We use CEOs' total 2016 compensation as reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which includes the value of the executives’ salary, bonus, stock and option awards, perks and increases in pension benefits received during the year.

The median family income in the Atlanta metro is $47,527 a year. Minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 annually.

Read the story: Georgia CEOs get their biggest raises in years | Gallery: Who were Georgia's highest-paid CEOs in 2016?

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About the Authors

Russell Grantham

Emily Merwin DiRico has been doing information design and news application development at the AJC since she arrived as a summer intern in 2009. Her mission is to help readers understand complex data and how it affects them.

John Perry is technical director of the AJC's data journalism team. Before joining the newspaper staff in 2008, Perry was the senior Computer-Assisted Reporting Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Washington, D.C.

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