Founder & Executive Compensation 2026

What this round asks

1. 1.
   What is the CEO's gross annual base salary?CEO annual base salary · EUR / year · definition
2. 2.
   What is the highest gross annual base salary paid to someone who is not a founder?Highest non-founder base salary · EUR / year · definition
3. 3.
   How many people sit on your leadership team?Leadership team size · count · definition
4. 4.
   What percentage of fully diluted share capital does the CEO hold?CEO fully diluted shareholding · % · definition
5. 5.
   What percentage of fully diluted share capital sits in the employee equity pool?Employee equity pool · % · definition
6. 6.
   Beyond base salary, which of these form part of the CEO's compensation?
7. 7.
   Who currently holds or receives employee equity in your company?
8. 8.
   Which inputs are used when setting leadership salaries?
9. 9.
   Which compensation or equity figure would you most like to see benchmarked next?

What you give

One submission per company, roughly ten minutes. You can save a draft and come back to it. Every numeric question shows its exact definition beside the input, so you are never guessing what is being asked.

What you get

The peer distribution for every question — p25, median and p75 for numbers, and the spread across options for choices. Filter it down by HQ country, ARR band, headcount, engineering headcount and funding type to compare against companies that actually resemble yours.

Any slice matching fewer than eight companies comes back suppressed rather than as a number. That is deliberate: it is what stops the benchmark being used to work out any single company's figures, including yours.