CEO pay in Nifty50 slips 10% as Wipro, Tech Mahindra cuts, new entrants drag average

The average remuneration of Nifty50 company chiefs fell 10.3% to ₹25.1 crore in FY25, dragged down by sharp pay cuts at IT firms Wipro and Tech Mahindra. The inclusion of Eternal and Bharat Electronics in the benchmark index also weighed on the numbers, pulling aggregate CEO pay down to ₹1,254 crore.

Eternal replaced BPCL in the Nifty50, while Bharat Electronics took the slot vacated by Divi’s Laboratories — whose chief remains the highest-paid in India’s pharma sector. Eternal’s Deepinder Goyal joined Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani in drawing no salary for FY25, further lowering the index’s average pay.

Even with the decline, average CEO compensation remains about ₹4 crore higher than in FY23, though roughly ₹3 crore lower than FY24 levels. Unlike last year, when IT leaders dominated pay hikes, the sharpest increases in FY25 were at Larsen & Toubro and Mahindra & Mahindra.

L&T’s SN Subrahmanyan saw his pay jump from ₹51.1 crore to ₹76.3 crore, while M&M’s Anish Shah received a ₹23-crore raise, taking his total remuneration to ₹47.3 crore.

The steepest declines came at Wipro, where CEO pay dropped by ₹114 crore, and at Tech Mahindra, where it fell by ₹38 crore. In FY24, former Wipro CEO Thierry Delaporte had drawn ₹167 crore, the highest in the IT sector at the time , which also included his final settlement after an ahead-of-schedule exit.

Other companies reporting sizable CEO pay cuts included JSW Steel and Maruti Suzuki, where remuneration declined by 13% and 37%, respectively.

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Separately, Rajeev Jain, who moved from Managing Director to Executive Vice Chairman at Bajaj Finance, and Hero MotoCorp’s Pawan Munjal each earned over ₹100 crore in FY25 — marking the second consecutive year their pay crossed the ₹100-crore threshold.

Among public sector undertakings, SBI Life’s Amit Jhingran led with ₹1.91 crore, followed by NTPC’s Gurdeep Singh at ₹1.74 crore. Chiefs of Coal India, Bharat Electronics and ONGC earned around ₹1 crore each, while State Bank of India chairman CS Setty drew ₹64 lakh, up from ₹39 lakh last year. Power Grid Corporation CMD Ravindra Kumar Tyagi earned ₹94 lakh in FY25.

Meanwhile, the combined net profit of Nifty50 companies rose 11.1% to ₹8.4 lakh crore, while revenues grew 8.8% to ₹68.4 lakh crore.