American entrepreneur and Life360 co-founder Chris Hulls is Australia’s highest-paid executive, earning almost $48 million in the 2025 financial year, nearly 500 times the average full-time salary.
Based in the United States, Mr. Hulls is currently the executive chairman of Life360, leading the company for nearly two decades and helping it achieve record results in 2025.
The Australian Stock Exchange-listed company has achieved Silicon Valley status with its popular GPS location-sharing app.
But he is not the only offshore CEO to feature in the latest list of the highest paid Australian public company executives.
US-based executives have laid claim to the biggest salaries in the ASX index, with five of the 10 highest paid this year being CEOs of US-based companies.
For the first time in the history of this study, “outsiders” took up half of the top ten spots, although US CEOs always featured.
The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) report looks at 80 ASX100 CEOs and 68 ASX101-200 CEOs, and the realized pay of 15 CEOs of ASX200 companies that are not domiciled in Australia and therefore do not report executive pay under the Australian disclosure system.
The report shows the average realized ASX100 CEO salary in FY2025 was $6,005,219, up from $5,732,321 in the previous year.
In the 2025 financial year, the average ASX100 CEO earned approximately 55 times more than the average employee.
ACSI bases this figure on average weekly full-time ABS earnings of $2,083.20. This applies to full-time workers and does not include part-time workers.
Mr. Hull’s salary was nearly 500 times the average full-time weekly earnings at the time. Lauren Antonoff succeeded him as CEO of Life360 last year.
In addition to Mr. Hulls, other US executives topping the list included ResMed CEO Mick Farrell and News Corporation CEO Robert Thomson.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson. (Supplied by: News Corp.)
ACSI said the 10 new CEOs included companies that had demonstrated significant value growth, including Mr Hulls, John Pilcher of biotech Neuren Pharmaceuticals and Raleigh Finlayson of Genesis Mineral.
ACSI said Mr. Pilcher’s realized salary of $21.7 million was made up almost entirely of a $20.8 million profit from the July 2025 sale of 1.5 million leveraged shares granted in prior years.
The highest paid CEO from Australia is Vikesh Ramsunder from Sigma Healthcare.
The highest paid ASX200 CEO from Australia was Vikesh Ramsunder, CEO of Sigma Healthcare.
This was his first appearance on the CEO list and followed the company’s merger with Chemist Warehouse.
Vikesh Ramsunder became the Managing Director and CEO of Sigma Healthcare Limited on 1 February 2022.Supplied by: Sigma Healthcare.)
The ACSI report looks at “realized wages,” which is calculated as reported fixed wages and cash bonus plus the value of any equity or one-time cash incentive granted during the reporting year.
This means that if a CEO uses part of his salary as an opportunity to cash out if the company’s stock price rises, he could make millions.
In Mr. Ramsunder’s case, his $32.62 million realized salary was driven by a $25.8 million gain from equity incentives vested primarily due to the February 2025 Sigma-Chemist Warehouse merger.
ACSI reported that it received approximately $34 million in proceeds from the sale of shares shortly after the merger was completed.
A Sigma spokesperson told ABC News that in relation to Mr Ramsunder’s FY25 remuneration, “it was a one-off and related to the sale of historic shares in one of the largest mergers in Australia’s corporate history”.
How realized wages can change from year to year
ACSI says its data is based on disclosures from annual reports, notices of “changes in directors’ interests” and other ASX announcements relating to new issues and movements of unquoted securities.
It notes that “the realized payment methodology is not a perfect indicator of the actual value received by the CEO because it can only be determined using the stock price at the time of the final sale of the underlying shares.”
The next three highest paid Australian CEOs, based on realized pay, also come from the ASX100: Macquarie’s Shemara Wikramanayake, Goodman Group’s Greg Goodman and BHP’s Mike Henry. They were also included in the fiscal year 2024 list.
Ms Wikramanayake’s actual salary in FY25 was $30.39 million, up from $29.76 million in FY24.
Macquarie Bank CEO Shemara Wikramanayake. (Macquarie Bank)
Mr. Goodman’s real salary fell from approximately $27 million in FY24 and FY23.
And Mr Henry’s realized salary fell from $19.28 million in FY24 to $13.21 million.
ASX CEO would rather lose job than bonus
This year’s research again found that an ASX100 CEO is more likely to lose his job than a bonus.
Ten ASX100 CEOs have left their positions. In contrast, only five bonus-eligible CEOs were left out.
Beyond the 2020 financial year, which was marked by the COVID pandemic, data shows that over the past 11 years, ASX100 executives received an average bonus of between 60 and 77 per cent of the maximum bonus level.
This year, only five executives received no bonus at all.
“The main concern for investors is that there is a culture of entitlement to annual bonuses,” said Ed John, executive manager of ACSI’s management division.
“Bonuses become an expectation, not a payment for our work. And this is a huge problem for investors.”
Ed John of the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors says the average ASX100 CEO earned about 55 times more than the average employee in the 2025 financial year. (ABC News: Billy Draper)
Because shareholders have demanded a board report on CEO pay for many years, fixed and cash payments to ASX100 CEOs are better controlled compared to previous years, he said.
With an average salary of $1.83 million, Australian executives still earn less than their peers in record-breaking 2012, who earned an average of $1.95 million.
The average ASX100 CEO salary realized was $4,800,898, up from $4,153,555 in the previous year.
Fixed wages continue to rise
The same stagnation in realized CEO pay was not observed in the fixed pay of ASX101-200 CEOs.
The ASX101-200 median fixed CEO salary rose 5.4% in FY25 to $1.14 million.
ASX100 CEO exit payouts cost shareholders $18.6 million in FY25, driven by increased payouts.
Nine executives received payouts, up from six in FY24.
The increase in average payouts from about $1.4 million to about $2.2 million was largely due to a large one-time payment in FY25 of $5.88 million to former Rio Tinto CEO Jacob Stausholm.