What COOs Actually Earn — and Why the Number Won't Hold Still

Search “chief operating officer compensation” and the aggregator pages do the same thing they do for every C-suite title: blend every filed figure into one median and hand it back as if “COO” describes one job. It doesn’t, and it is worse on this axis than almost any other seat in the C-suite. A CFO’s remit is reasonably consistent from company to company — finance, reporting, treasury, often investor relations. A COO’s remit is whatever the CEO didn’t want to keep, and that varies enormously by company.

Why the title moves before the company does

At most companies, a CFO is a CFO — Sarbanes-Oxley Section 302 requires the CEO and CFO personally to certify the company’s financial statements, and that certification requirement anchors the job to a fairly stable core regardless of company. A COO has no equivalent anchor. The role gets defined by what the CEO chooses to delegate, which means the same title can mean a chief of staff with a bigger office, an executive running every operating division that isn’t revenue-facing, or the person the board has quietly agreed will run the company next. None of those are the same job, and pricing them against one benchmark treats a chief-of-staff seat, a divisional operating role, and a CEO-in-waiting as interchangeable.

That variance shows up directly in the two filed examples below — not as a coincidence, but because it is close to the whole story.

Two real numbers, filed with the SEC

JPMorgan Chase’s 2026 proxy statement discloses Daniel Pinto’s fiscal 2025 compensation. Pinto served as the bank’s President and Chief Operating Officer until June 2025; fiscal 2025 is the final year the proxy discloses him under that title before his move to Vice Chair: a base salary of $1,500,000; a bonus of $5,000,000; stock awards of $25,000,000; and $116,871 in other compensation, for a filed total of $31,616,871.

Mission Produce’s 2026 proxy statement discloses John Pawlowski’s fiscal 2025 compensation as President and Chief Operating Officer of the avocado grower and distributor: a base salary of $619,385; a bonus of $124,800; a non-equity incentive payout of $606,528; stock awards of $964,907; and $84,331 in other compensation, for a filed total of $2,399,951. The same filing discloses that Pawlowski, who joined the company in April 2024, is set to become Mission Produce’s Chief Executive Officer at the close of the 2026 annual meeting, with current CEO Stephen Barnard moving to Executive Chairman.

Pinto’s filed total runs to roughly thirteen times Pawlowski’s, and almost none of that gap is base salary — the two salaries sit less than three times apart. It is the stock award, again, that does the heavy lifting: a mega-bank sizes an operating executive’s equity against its own market capitalization, and JPMorgan’s is not comparable to a mid-cap produce company’s by any measure. But the roles themselves are not the same job at different scale, either. Pinto ran operations beneath the CEO of one of the largest banks in the world. Pawlowski is running operations at Mission Produce on his way to becoming its next CEO — a role that reads less like a peer operating executive and more like structured succession grooming. That reading is consistent with the comp structure, even though the filing doesn’t say so directly: a much larger share of his package sits in a non-equity incentive payout tied to near-term performance than in Pinto’s case, where the cash award is disclosed as a discretionary bonus instead.

What a single aggregator number can’t see

Neither of these executives is “a COO” in the way a job board treats the title — one interchangeable line item, comparable across companies once you adjust for size. Pinto’s role and Pawlowski’s role sit at different points on two separate axes: how large the company is, and what the seat is actually being asked to do once you get past the label on the door. Averaging them together, or averaging either of them into a wider aggregator sample without knowing which axis moved, produces a number that describes neither job.

This is where “chief operating officer” resists benchmarking harder than most titles: the label alone doesn’t tell a board which of these two situations — or the several others a COO search regularly turns up, from an integration-focused operating seat brought in after an acquisition to a narrower supply-chain-and-manufacturing mandate — it is actually pricing.

What a filing can and can’t settle

A proxy’s Summary Compensation Table has one clear advantage over an aggregator page: it names the person, the year, and the exact dollars, broken into cash and equity, filed with a regulator anyone can query directly. Pulling Pinto’s or Pawlowski’s numbers from EDGAR meant reading a document, not trusting a scrape.

What that document can’t do is tell a board whether its own COO opening looks like either one. Revenue and headcount are the easy filters; they don’t answer whether the seat runs manufacturing and supply chain, the entire non-revenue org, or is functioning as a holding pattern before a CEO transition — and two companies matched on size and sector can still be pricing unrelated jobs under an identical title. A private company has no filing to start from at all, which means the scope question matters more there, not less: there’s no public document to catch a mismatched comparison after the fact.

What this means for scoping a search

The useful question when setting a target range for a COO search is not “what does a COO make.” It’s closer to: what does this specific mandate — this scope, this level of P&L ownership, this relationship to the CEO seat — actually cost, once the label is set aside and the job underneath it is described plainly. That description has to come before the comp conversation, not after it, because the title alone won’t tell a recruiter, a board, or a candidate which of several genuinely different jobs is actually on offer.

For what the healthcare sector changes about the role, see healthcare executive search. For the adjacent comp question, see what CFOs earn, and what actually sets the number. On how a retained search firm scopes a mandate like this one before it goes to market, see what a retained search firm does. On establishing in the room which of those jobs a candidate actually ran, see the COO questions that discriminate.