Dive Brief:
- General counsel and chief legal officers in the United States earn an average of $578,446 in total actual cash compensation, Major Lindsey & Africa say based on a survey released Wednesday and conducted a few months ago.
- The bigger the company, the higher the pay, with smallest-company GCs earning around $453,000 and biggest-company GCs typically topping $1.1 million. The biggest companies are those with $10 billion or more in revenue.
- Company location is important, too. GCs in Houston and New York, among big metro areas, tend to make the most, about $713,000 and $692,000, respectively. Pay in Seattle and Denver tends to be less, $403,000 and $404,000, respectively.
Dive Insight:
The pay hikes have come as companies try to navigate economic uncertainty, so incentive-based pay tends to be a bigger part of compensation than before. When base salary and bonuses are separated out, it becomes clear much of GCs’ compensation increase comes from performance pay. While base salary increased 8%, bonus pay increased 16%.
“Bonuses, or variable compensation, now represent 40% to 50% of a GC’s annual compensation in the United States,” the survey report says.
Pay for other in-house positions is also up, although not at quite the same percentages. Pay for deputy and associate GCs, for example, is up about 12%, to roughly $387,000, and for chief compliance officers, which the report highlights as an increasingly important role because of escalating regulatory requirements, pay is up 9%, to about $430,000.
“We expect this number to grow in the years ahead as companies look to avoid regulatory and litigation risk,” the report says.
The only position seeing a drop in compensation is counsel, for which pay is typically $180,000, 10% less than in 2020. The report doesn’t mention why that might be.
