Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's pay dropped in the company’s most recent fiscal year — all the way down to $90.6 million.

It marks a nearly $6 million slide in total compensation from a year earlier for Nadella, according to an Oct. 21 regulatory filing. But it’s still up from the cool $79.1 million he made the year before that.

The drop came as Microsoft's stock tumbled on Wall Street during its 2026 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. Since then, it’s rebounded to record high levels. Microsoft on Monday announced a sweeping round of buyout offers for about 60,000 employees, though it anticipates only a few thousand may actually take the severance package.

Executive compensation at large companies can be tricky to track as most top leaders have their annual pay concentrated in performance-based stock awards — shares of the company that are vested to them over time. This is especially the case in the tech industry.

Nadella’s annual base salary stayed flat at $2.5 million this year, a figure that hasn’t received a bump since 2019. Outside of his salary, security and travel expenses, incentive-based cash bonuses and a retirement plan, all of Nadella’s compensation last year was wrapped up in stock awards, to the tune of $77.5 million.

Nadella’s cash bonus, which is determined by various metrics around cybersecurity, company culture and product performance at Microsoft, grew to $10.3 million. It’s almost twice what Nadella took home in 2024, when he requested a reduced cash bonus after cyberattacks hit the company and tarnished its reputation.

Per regulatory rules, Microsoft had to disclose the total compensation of its median employee, excluding Nadella. That figure jumped from just over $200,000 last year to more than $215,000 this year.

Even as Nadella’s compensation fell, Microsoft’s CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio of 421-to-1 is still way above what it was just three years ago. It’s also higher than other Seattle-area companies.

Amazon, for example, has one of the lower ratios between CEO and employee pay, despite its median worker making $40,206 per year, according to a regulatory filing from April. The same document disclosed Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s compensation last year was less than $2.1 million. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Jassy’s annual take-home pay is a fraction of Nadella’s, rather it’s a quirk of regulatory reporting and the way each company structures stock awards.

When Jassy took over Amazon from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, he received a stock award valued at $212 million. That amount was scheduled to vest to Jassy through 2030, which means he actually brought home about $45 million last year.

Another outlier is Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, who joined the company in 2024 and received a compensation package of $96 million. Coupled with Starbucks’ lower-wage workforce compared with Microsoft, the coffee giant’s CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio was 6,666-to-1 that year.

Perhaps one of the strangest executive compensation figures among Seattle companies was for Bezos, who in his last full year as Amazon CEO in 2020 made $1.68 million. Bezos was the richest person in the world at the time, even as his base salary was $81,840.

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