How much does someone who leads one of the largest Italian companies listed on the stock exchange earn? The short answer is: millions of euros per year. But the real point is that the fixed salary now represents only a part of the overall compensation. According to the Study on the compensation of the Boards of Directors of companies belonging to the Ftse Mib index carried out by Marsh, in 2025 the median fixed remuneration of the CEOs of the main Italian listed companies was approximately 1.24 million euros gross per year.
Added to this figure is a median annual bonus of approximately 762 thousand euros. Adding only these two components we therefore arrive at approximately 2 million euros per year. But that’s not the full story yet. In fact, the CEOs of large companies increasingly receive a substantial part of their remuneration in the form of bonuses and multi-year incentives.
Salary is only one part
In 2026, the earning opportunity linked to short-term incentives, the so-called STI (Short term incentives), increased by 28% compared to 2025. Long-term incentives, the Lti (Long term incentives), instead grew by 25%.
The latter can be linked to the company’s results achieved over several years and are often also recognized through actions. In the non-financial companies of the Ftse Mib, according to Marsh, the fixed salary now represents only 33% of the potential remuneration package of a CEO. 27% is made up of short-term incentives and the remaining 40% of long-term incentives.
In practice, about two-thirds of what a CEO can earn depends on bonuses. To get an idea of the overall remuneration you must therefore go beyond the salary alone.
Another study published in 2026, carried out by Cutillo & Partners for the Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance Observatory of the Luiss Business School, estimates a median total compensation of more than 3.5 million euros for the CEOs of a sample of Ftse Mib companies.
| Society | Total compensation 2025 | ||
| 1 | Carlo Messina | Intesa Sanpaolo | €12.62 million |
| 2 | Andrea Orcel | UniCredit | €11.47 million |
| 3 | Philippe Donnet | General | €10.12 million |
| 4 | Claudio Descalzi | Eni | €8.3 million |
| 5 | Flavio Cattaneo | Enel | €7.9 million |
| 6 | Giuseppe Castagna | BPM desk | €5.01 million |
| 7 | Paolo Bertoluzzo | Nexi | €4.76 million |
| 8 | Remo Ruffini | Moncler | €4.34 million |
| 9 | Gianni Franco Pope | BPER Bank | €4.23 million |
| 10 | Matteo Laterza | Unipol | €4.22 million |
The figure includes not only the fixed salary and the annual bonus, but also the equity and long-term incentives.