The typical tech leader’s pay rose $810k since 2021—more than COOs, CFOs, and CIOs combined

Tech leaders have spent years talking up AI’s effect on work. Their own pay has been changing just as quickly. Median compensation for executives with “technology” in the title hit $2.6 million in the latest fiscal year, according to data compiled for Fortune by C-suite Comp. That was up 45.4% from 2021. It also outpaced the rest of the C-suite by a wide margin: median pay rose 18.3% for COOs, 17.2% for CEOs, 15% for CFOs and 9.2% for chief information officers.

The dollar gains tell the same story, and they’re the more striking part. Median pay for chief technology officers rose $809,587 from 2021 to 2025. Median CEO pay rose $698,399 over the same stretch, even though CEOs started from a much higher base. Taken together, operating, finance and information chiefs gained $725,584 at the median. The usual hierarchy in the boardroom hasn’t disappeared, but it has shifted enough that CTOs are now ahead of COOs at the median, after trailing them in 2021.

Hims & Hers showed how far boards are willing to go for AI-era technical talent. In May 2025, the company approved two hiring awards for incoming executives. New COO Nader Kabbani got 216,333 restricted stock units valued at $13.5 million. Incoming CTO Mohamed Elshenawy got 1,036,339 RSUs valued at $57.2 million, more than four times as much. The board said competition for experienced AI talent was intense, and tied Elshenawy’s package to the “unique competitive circumstances for AI talent.” Kabbani’s award got no similar explanation. Elshenawy later reported 2025 compensation of $60.9 million, versus $23 million for CEO and co-founder Andrew Dudum.

The surge lines up with the post-ChatGPT scramble. ChatGPT launched in November 2022, reached 100 million users about two months later, and OpenAI’s enterprise product arrived in August 2023. Microsoft started selling Copilot to enterprise customers in fall 2023, with Pfizer and Chevron among the early users. During that cycle, median tech compensation rose 28.9% in a single year, the largest jump in the data from 2021 to 2025. That wasn’t just about giant frontier labs handing out headline-grabbing bonuses. Companies such as Symbiotic and Workday also paid up for senior technical leaders, while Walmart increased Suresh Kumar’s annual equity target by $1 million, pushing his target comp slightly above the 75th percentile of his peer group.

The broader message from boards is simple enough. CTO work is no longer just about keeping systems running. It’s about strategy, workflow, customers and data, with AI sitting in the middle of the whole thing. That makes the role harder to benchmark, easier to justify, and much more expensive to hire or keep.