Low-wage S&P 500 companies spent $718 billion on stock buybacks since 2019, report finds

The 100 corporations in the S&P 500 that pay their median workers the least spent a combined $718 billion on stock buybacks between 2019 and 2025, according to a report published August 27 by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The report, titled Executive Excess 2026, is the 32nd annual edition of the Institute’s Executive Excess series. It tracks what it calls the “Low-Wage 100,” a list of the S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay that includes Walmart, Amazon, Target, DoorDash and Home Depot. In 2025 alone, those companies spent $108.6 billion buying back their own shares, a maneuver that raises a company’s stock price and, with it, the value of stock-based executive pay.

Report author Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, found that the average CEO among the Low-Wage 100 earned $17.5 million in 2025, while the average median worker at those companies earned $36,571.

The ratio between the two has widened since the Institute began tracking it. CEOs at Low-Wage 100 companies earned 574 times their median worker’s pay in 2019 and 614 times in 2025, the report found. At 18 of the 100 companies, median worker pay fell in nominal terms over that period.

Walmart spent $8.1 billion on buybacks in 2025 while paying its CEO $29.2 million against a median worker wage of $30,520, a ratio of 958 to 1, according to the report. The Institute calculated that Walmart’s 2025 buyback spending alone could have funded a $3,851 bonus for each of its 2.1 million employees.

The widest pay gap among the companies tracked belonged to optical component maker Lumentum, where CEO Michael Hurlston was paid $27.7 million in 2025 against a median worker wage of $9,595, a ratio of 2,884 to 1, the report found.

The report also counted 1,282 registered federal lobbyists working on behalf of Low-Wage 100 companies, and said those firms had pushed for passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax legislation that paired corporate and individual tax cuts with reductions to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The report profiled six of the 100 companies for staying silent as immigration enforcement actions affected their own workers.

At least 36 billionaires have accumulated wealth through Low-Wage 100 companies, the report found. Six of the firms have produced more than one billionaire each: Walmart with eight, Estée Lauder with four, DoorDash with three, and Public Storage, Carvana and Tyson Foods with two each.

The companies named in the report span retail, food delivery, storage, cosmetics and meatpacking, among other sectors, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, which drew on companies’ own disclosures of CEO pay, median worker pay and share repurchases in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The report closes with three policy recommendations: taxing companies with the largest gaps between CEO and median worker pay, raising the existing federal tax on stock buybacks, and restricting buybacks and executive pay at companies that hold federal contracts or subsidies.

The $718 billion in cumulative buybacks reported this year compares with $108.6 billion spent by the same group of companies in 2025 alone, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.