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E-MailDaisy Laska and Stephanie Lane are Consultants and Ted Simmons is a Managing Director at FW Cook. This post is based on their FW Cook memorandum.
Executive Summary
FW Cook’s 2026 Director Compensation Report examines non-employee director pay and program design at 300 U.S. public companies. Approximately 92% of companies also appeared in the 2025 study, supporting reliable year-over-year comparisons.
Research Sample
This study is based on a sample of 300 U.S. public companies equally divided among small-, mid-, and large-cap size segments (100 companies per segment) and further classified into five sectors: Energy, Financials, Industrials, Retail, and Technology (60 companies per sector) based on Standard & Poor’s Global Industry Classification Standard (“GICS”) codes. Approximately 92% of this year’s sample companies were constituents of last year’s sample, which allows for reliable year-over-year comparisons.
Market capitalization (as of April 15, 2026) and trailing four-quarters revenue are summarized below (all financial data sourced from S&P’s Capital IQ Database):
The complete publication is available here.
