Property Week's annual Best-Paid Executives Top 40 analysis has revealed a 15% dip in the total earnings of industry leaders, from £103.3m in 2022-23 to £89.9m, the fall in rewards reflecting a challenging market environment.

Ten companies in the top 40 – Berkeley, Vistry, Landsec, SEGRO, LondonMetric, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt, Unite Group, and Rightmove – are constituents of the FTSE 100.The chief executives of these firms earned a median pay of £2.5m, the analysis showed.

Meanwhile, median pay for chief executives across the whole of the FTSE 100 was £4.19m in 2023, up 2.2% on the £4.1m median in 2022, according to an August 2024 report from the High Pay Centre.

The think tank argues that “excessive spending” on top earners makes it harder to fund pay increases for the wider UK workforce.

However, other industry experts argue that the pay of executives in the UK is not competitive enough, especially when compared with rewards in the US.

Six women appeared in the top 40 list, three more than last year. Rita Rose-Gagne, ranked second, became the first woman to make the top five in Property Week’s analysis..

However, while the top five ranking male executives earned a combined total of £20.7m, representing a median pay of £3.2m, the top five highest-earning women took home just over half that figure, at a combined total of £11.2m for, representing a median pay of £1.9m.

Just 11 of the 102 executives in the data sample were women, highlighting the imbalance between the number of men and women in senior industry positions. Previous Property Week analysis of 20 bellwether property firms – both publicly listed and privately held – found a median gender pay gap of 22.8%.