The average nonprofit hospital CEO takes home 8 times more than their hourly workers, Lown Institute finds

CEOs of nonprofit hospitals are compensated, on average, more than eight times more than the hourly employees without advanced degrees working beneath them, according to a Lown Institute analysis of nearly 1,100 hospitals published Thursday in Health Affairs. The differences varied widely across hospitals, with CEOs at the 50 nonprofits with the tightest pay gap earning about twice as much as their average worker and the 50 CEOs at the other end of the spectrum taking home about 26 times more than their average worker, according to the researchers. “While such glaring chasms in pay are not unique to hospitals, the pandemic has triggered the question of whether executive compensation should be part of the broader discussion about equity within our health care system, especially as minorities and women are often the employees at the lower end of the wage spectrum,” researchers affiliated with the Lown Institute wrote in Health Affairs. Still, the researchers noted several cases where different hospitals paid their CEOs far different amounts despite being of similar size or type, being in the same city and paying their hourly workers roughly similar wages.