Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has an annual base salary of $2.0 million, but almost all of his pay comes in a large equity award granted every three years. Alphabet’s 2026 proxy statement reports his total compensation at $10,906,079 for fiscal 2025, a year with no new equity grant, against $225,985,145 for fiscal 2022, the year of his last triennial award. Pichai has been CEO of Google since October 2015 and of Alphabet since December 2019.
Alphabet's compensation committee kept Pichai's annual salary at $2.0 million in 2025. The proxy reports salary actually paid of $2,007,692 for fiscal 2025, because pay is calculated on working days.
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Equity every three years
The committee follows a triennial grant cadence for CEO equity awards. His last award was granted in December 2022 and fully vested at the end of December 2025, so fiscal 2023 and 2025 show no stock awards.
Performance stock units (PSUs) vest according to Alphabet's total shareholder return ranked against the companies in the S&P 100; the rest are time-based Alphabet stock units (GSUs).
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Security counted as pay
Alphabet pays for residential security, monitoring, car and driver services and travel security. These came to $8,803,400 in fiscal 2025 and appear under all other compensation.
What changed in 2025-26
A new award in March 2026
The compensation committee granted Pichai a new equity award in March 2026. Target values were unchanged from the 2022 award: $84,000,000 in GSUs and two PSU tranches of $63,000,000 each, with a larger share of the award now tied to performance, according to the 2026 proxy statement.
Pay linked to Waymo and Wing
For the first time the award includes Bet Performance Units tied to Waymo, the self-driving unit, with a target value of about $130,000,000, and to the drone-delivery unit Wing, about $45,000,000. They vest only if each unit’s value per unit rises over a target three-year period.
The AI year behind the numbers
The board’s letter in the 2026 proxy cites the launch of the Gemini 3 model and agentic features across Google’s products in 2025. Alphabet reported record net income of $132,170 million for fiscal 2025, and the proxy’s compensation actually paid to Pichai, which tracks the share price, was $213,903,156.
Pay ratio and the shareholder vote
Alphabet reported a 2025 CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio of 35 to 1, with median employee compensation of $310,826. Shareholders hold an advisory say-on-pay vote every three years, and one was on the 2026 annual meeting agenda.
Sundar Pichai's reported total compensation by fiscal year (Alphabet 2026 proxy)
2025
Total compensation (summary table)$10,906,079
What drove itSalary plus $8,803,400 of personal security; no new equity grant
2024
Total compensation (summary table)$10,800,694
What drove itIncludes $405,630 of stock awards; restated for $75,651 of aircraft use
2023
Total compensation (summary table)$8,802,824
What drove itSalary of $2,000,000 plus other compensation; no stock awards
2022
Total compensation (summary table)$225,985,145
What drove itYear of the triennial equity award
2021
Total compensation (summary table)$6,322,599
What drove itNo triennial grant that year
What it means for you
Read the summary compensation table year by year: a triennial grant makes one year look huge and the next two look small.
Compare reported pay (grant-date value) with compensation actually paid, which moves with the share price.
Check what share of the award depends on relative shareholder return, not just on staying in the job.
Note new metrics such as Waymo and Wing units: they show where the board wants the CEO's attention.
Use the pay ratio and say-on-pay results to see how shareholders and staff read the package.
The Business Engineer lens
Pichai’s pay is a bet on Alphabet’s share price and, since 2026, on Waymo and Wing becoming businesses of their own. The Business Engineer reads that as the board pricing in AI and autonomy as the next growth layers beyond Search.
Sundar Pichai's annual salary is $2.0 million. Alphabet reported $2,007,692 of salary paid in fiscal 2025.
How much did Sundar Pichai earn in 2025?
His reported total compensation for fiscal 2025 was $10,906,079, mostly salary and $8,803,400 of personal security costs, because no equity award was granted that year.
Why was Pichai's 2022 pay so high?
Alphabet grants the CEO a large equity award every three years. 2022 was a grant year, so reported compensation was $225,985,145.
What is in Pichai's 2026 award?
GSUs with a target value of $84,000,000, two PSU tranches of $63,000,000 each, and performance units tied to Waymo (about $130,000,000) and Wing (about $45,000,000).
The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.
Google’s CEO base salary is $2 million per year. In addition to the base salary, the CEO of the company also earns stock awards and other compensations that go well beyond its base salary.
It’s important to remark that regarding the CEO job and other top executives’ roles, what matters is not the base salary but rather the performance-based compensation.
Google Services earned $39.5B and Cloud $8.8B; Other Bets and shared AI costs took $7.6B. Source: Alphabet quarterly earnings releases (Form 8-K, SEC EDGAR). Alphabet-level activities as described in the release. Analysis by The Business Engineer.Drawing by The Business Engineer.
How we source: figures on this page come from the company’s own filings (SEC 10-K, 10-Q and earnings releases, or its annual report), with the period stated next to each number. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.
A 3-minute explainer of Google's business model and latest numbers, built from its SEC filings. Analysis by The Business Engineer.
For example, the case of Sundar Pichai, whose 2022 triennial equity award made that year’s reported compensation $225,985,145, part of it tied to Alphabet’s shareholder return.
Search is still Google's engine ($63.3B, +17%), but Cloud is catching up fast. Source: Alphabet quarterly earnings releases (Form 8-K, SEC EDGAR). Analysis by The Business Engineer.
Sundar Pichai’s annual base salary is $2.0 million. Alphabet’s 2026 proxy statement reports his total compensation at $10,906,079 for fiscal 2025, a year without a new equity grant, and $225,985,145 for fiscal 2022, the year of his last triennial award. In March 2026 he received a new award with target values of $84,000,000 in GSUs and two PSU tranches of $63,000,000 each, plus performance units tied to Waymo and Wing.
For example, the case of Sundar Pichai, whose 2022 triennial equity award made that year’s reported compensation $225,985,145, part of it tied to Alphabet’s shareholder return.
Or the case of Satya Nadella, whom Microsoft's 2022 proxy statement listed as owning 763,518 Microsoft shares.
Layout refreshed 7 October 2026. The article text below is unchanged.
Why it mattersFrom the article
In addition to the base salary, the CEO of the company also earns stock awards and other compensations that go well beyond its base salary.
Microsoft’s 2022 proxy statement listed Satya Nadella as owning 763,518 Microsoft shares. For fiscal 2022 he received a $2.5 million base salary, $42.27 million in stock awards and over $10 million in non-equity incentive pay, and Microsoft said over 95% of his annual target compensation was performance-based.
Google in charts
Alphabet spent $91B on property and equipment in 2025, up from $53B in 2024. Source: Alphabet Form 10-K filings via SEC EDGAR XBRL company facts. Analysis by The Business Engineer.Alphabet at a glance: $120B of revenue and $40.8B of operating income in one quarter. Source: Alphabet quarterly earnings releases (Form 8-K, SEC EDGAR) (Q2 2026). YoY calculated. Analysis by The Business Engineer.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
