В Миннесоте зафиксирован рекордный разрыв в оплате труда: гендиректор Life Time заработал 218 млн долларов, а медианный сотрудник — всего 9 816 долларов

Last year Life Time’s founder and CEO Bahram Akradi was the highest-paid CEO among Minnesota public companies at $218.2 million, but the fitness firm’s median employee pay was the lowest. The pay gap between executive pay and that of median employees is widening nationally and in Minnesota, as executive pay increases more each year than that of a typical employee. Nationally in 2025, the average CEO pay increased 6% to $17.7 million at S&P 500 companies. A median employee at those same companies earned $89,744, a 4.7% increase, according to an Associated Press compensation report done with the help of consulting firm Equilar. Among Minnesota companies, the CEO pay ratio ranged from 1,548-to-1 at Life Time to 13.6-to-1 at Bridgewater Bancshares, according to proxies filed by the public companies. The median used in publicly reported pay ratios isn’t an average of workers’ wages. Instead, a company can track one employee who fits the median definition over three years. People are also reading… That formula can lead to some quirks if the person’s compensation doesn’t reflect overall changes at the company. For example, Polaris’ median compensation fell 13% last year. A spokeswoman said last year’s drop was because that employee did not work the full 12 months, as the worker had in past years. If the worker had, the median would have increased 16%. It’s also hard to compare industries, because companies like Life Time, Target and Best Buy have more seasonal or part-time retail employees. The total CEO compensation formula used for proxies differs from the one the Minnesota Star Tribune uses. Under the proxy measure, which counts granted stock awards, Akradi’s compensation was $15.2 million. Still, the CEO-to-median pay ratio was the widest because the median employee made $9,816. At Life Time, 33,000 of the 44,000 employees work part-time, and some only work a few hours a week. The lowest-paid employees make the legal minimum wage, which varies by state. The lowest pay is $7.25 an hour, which annualized for a full-time worker is $15,080. The average wage for full-time employees, though, is much higher at $60,000, a Life Time spokesperson said. Target’s median compensation is $27,506. The minimum wage ranges from $15 to $24 an hour, depending on location, the company said. That annualizes to $31,200 to $49,920 if working full-time. At three Minnesota companies, the median employee was paid more than $200,000: Piper Sandler, Inspire Medical Systems and Northern Oil and Gas. At Piper Sandler, an investment banking company, there are few part-time employees, one reason for the high median of $227,702. The overall median pay among all 40 Minnesota companies required to report median pay was $70,699, up 14.5% since 2022, a compound annual growth of 3.4% a year. Sarah Anderson, a program director at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, produces the Low-Wage 100 among S&P 500 stocks. The list for 2025 includes Target, Best Buy, Fastenal, Pentair and Ecolab. She said companies fought against reporting the pay ratio and median pay that were part of the 2010 Dodd Frank Act. But investors, she said, should know if a company bases its business model on a part-time workforce. “I think it’s a perfectly legitimate and actually really important indicator,” Anderson said.