Personal security spread to a majority of S&P 500 CEOs within a single year

A prevalence number and a spending number can move in opposite directions when the thing being bought changes. Pay Governance reports CEO security values were mixed in FY2025: the median up about 14 percent, the 75th percentile down 18 percent ^[7]. Part of that, the firm says, is cheaper protection entering the disclosure for the first time, including digital monitoring, privacy and identity theft protection, and home network security ^[8]. A company can begin reporting a security benefit without spending anything close to what a driver and a standing detail cost. Prevalence rose 19 percentage points on the year ^[1].

Below the CEO, both the count and the money moved. The median for other named executives roughly tripled, and the upper quartile rose about four and a half times ^[2][3]. The number of non-CEO executives disclosed above $100,000 also roughly tripled ^[4]. That last figure still describes a narrow population: 57 executives, sitting at no more than 57 of the index's 500 companies, since a single company can report more than one ^[6].

Corporate aircraft is the harder disclosure question. CEO aircraft usage values rose 17 percent at the median and 37 percent at the 75th percentile ^[9]. Pay Governance says some companies now require personal aircraft use under board-approved security policies instead of offering it as a standalone perquisite ^[10]. The category decides who defends the cost and on what grounds. A perquisite is defended by the compensation committee as pay; a board-approved security measure is defended as risk management, with an outside assessment behind it ^[14].

Aubrey Bout, Rebecca Friday and Ben Futterman of Pay Governance wrote that the most notable development "is not simply higher disclosed values for CEOs, but the wider expansion of these programs to select members of the leadership team, supported by stronger governance practices and more detailed proxy disclosure" ^[12][13].

A skeptic would call this one year of proxies reacting to one killing. The memo dates the wave of outside security reviews to the murder of a healthcare insurance company executive in December 2024, and says some of those reviews led to increased protection ^[11]. The base years answer part of the objection: coverage of at least one non-CEO named executive sat below 20 percent in both FY2023 and FY2024 before reaching roughly 47 percent ^[3][2]. Two flat years and then a jump of that size is many boards changing policy inside the same window.

For a committee working on the next proxy, the peer comparison looks different. CEO coverage at 54 percent and non-CEO coverage at 47 percent are seven points apart ^[5], so a peer check no longer supports treating protection below the CEO as an exception. Benchmarking the amount is harder, because the memo gives CEO changes in percentage terms and dollar levels only for the other named executives ^[16]. In the 2026 proxies it counted more references to personal data removal, home network monitoring and independent risk assessments, and more discussion of governance oversight ^[14][15].