Defense contractors’ CEOs received $162.6 million in 2025 pay, up 13%, proxy filings show

By Garrett Sloane

WASHINGTON — The chief executives of the seven largest U.S. defense contractors received a combined $162.6 million in reported compensation for 2025, up about 13% from 2024, according to a Washington Inquisitor review of the companies’ proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Each company’s figure below links to its proxy, and the method is explained at the end of this story.

Five of the seven CEOs were each paid between $23.4 million and $25.9 million. Six of the seven companies reported a CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio above 160 to 1. General Dynamics’ Phebe Novakovic was the highest paid at $25,924,082. HII’s Christopher Kastner was the lowest at $13,809,406.

The seven companies, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, HII and L3Harris Technologies, together received about $184.4 billion in Defense Department contract obligations in fiscal 2025, according to an Inquisitor consolidation of USAspending.gov records. Their boards say most CEO pay depends on performance and long-term shareholder returns. RTX’s proxy, for example, says “the largest portion” of its top executives’ pay is “at-risk,” meaning it depends on future stock price or performance goals.

The figures below are “total compensation” as reported in each company’s Summary Compensation Table. That is the SEC-required measure. It counts stock and option awards at their grant-date fair value, an accounting estimate of what the awards were worth when granted. It is not cash received, and executives may ultimately realize more or less than that.

The 2025 numbers

Source: 2026 proxy statements (DEF 14A), Summary Compensation Table and CEO pay-ratio disclosure. *Ortberg became Boeing’s CEO in August 2024, so his 2024 figure covers a partial year. The 2024 total for all seven is $143,694,163. Percentage changes are Inquisitor calculations.

The biggest increase was at RTX, where Calio’s reported pay rose 38%. Boeing’s 28% increase mostly reflects Ortberg’s first full year in the job. Lockheed Martin and HII were the only two companies where reported CEO pay fell. At Lockheed, Taiclet’s reported total slipped 1.3% even as the company remained by far the Pentagon’s largest contractor. At HII, Kastner’s total fell 5.1%, and he remained the lowest paid of the seven by more than $9.6 million.

Pay set against Pentagon dollars

All seven companies depend heavily on federal contracts, but to very different degrees. Boeing earns much of its revenue from commercial airplanes, while HII builds almost entirely for the Navy and Coast Guard. The table below sets each CEO’s reported 2025 pay beside the company’s fiscal 2025 Defense Department obligations. It is meant to give scale, not to measure whether pay is earned. Obligations are recorded by fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, while proxy pay covers the calendar year.

Source: Obligations are an Inquisitor consolidation of prime award transactions on USAspending.gov, fiscal 2025, Department of Defense awarding agency, grouped by parent company. Figures for Northrop Grumman and L3Harris may understate the parents’ totals where subsidiaries report under separate recipient names. Pay from proxy statements as above.

Lockheed Martin’s CEO received the least per dollar of defense business because the company’s obligations are so large. Its fiscal 2025 total of $74.62 billion is more than General Dynamics’ and RTX’s combined. L3Harris sits at the other end of the table. Its obligation figure as recorded in USAspending is the smallest of the seven, though much of its defense work comes through subcontracts and subsidiaries.

Perquisites: security, aircraft and relocation

The proxies also list “all other compensation,” including personal benefits. Several companies require their CEOs to use company aircraft for security reasons and report the cost of personal flights as compensation.

Source: 2026 proxy statements, “All Other Compensation” tables and footnotes. Categories are as described by each company. Not every company itemizes the same categories, so amounts are not directly comparable.

Two of the seven CEOs are leaving

Two of the executives in the table no longer run, or soon will not run, their companies.

L3Harris said in an Aug. 17, 2026 filing that Kubasik and the company had “mutually agreed to end” his employment. The decision followed an investigation by independent directors working with independent counsel. The board determined that he “engaged in conduct that was not consistent with the values of the Company as outlined in its Code of Conduct,” the filing said. The company also said the conduct “did not involve, and has no impact on, the Company’s financial reporting, controls, customer relationships or operational performance.” It did not describe the conduct further. According to the filing, Kubasik will receive no severance and no accelerated vesting, though he keeps options that had already vested. The Inquisitor does not know of any finding by a court or regulator concerning the matter.

The same filing named Sam Mehta, 53, president and chief executive. Before joining L3Harris he was president of Advanced Structures at Collins Aerospace, an RTX unit. His pay was set at an annual salary of $1,250,000, a target bonus of 200% of salary and a target long-term incentive award of $13,250,000, prorated for 2026. On Oct. 21, L3Harris added Kimberly Fields, chief executive of ATI, to its board.

General Dynamics announced in an Oct. 7 filing that Danny Deep, 56, will become CEO on Jan. 1, 2027. Novakovic, CEO since 2013, will become executive chairman.

How shareholders voted

Shareholders vote each year, on a nonbinding basis, on executive pay packages. The 2026 proxies report how the 2025 “say on pay” votes went. Most passed comfortably. L3Harris was the exception.

L3Harris’ proxy acknowledged that its 74% result was “a decline from prior years and below our historical average of ~93% over the prior 5 years.” The company said it then contacted its largest institutional shareholders in the summer and fall of 2025 for a targeted outreach on executive compensation, involving its chief human resources officer and general counsel, among others. Boeing’s board called its 85% vote, the first after Ortberg’s arrival, “a strong vote of confidence.”

How the boards explain it

Each compensation committee says it measures CEO pay against a peer group of large aerospace, defense and industrial companies. Each says most target pay is linked to multiyear stock performance and to financial goals such as free cash flow, earnings per share and return on invested capital. Northrop Grumman’s proxy says its structure “places an appropriate amount of compensation at risk based on annual and long-term results.” General Dynamics says the bulk of Novakovic’s target pay “was linked to metrics assessing company or stock performance and therefore meaningfully at-risk.” HII says “a significant portion of the potential compensation of our executives is at risk.”

The pay ratios reflect each company’s workforce as well as its CEO pay. HII, whose median employee earned $85,536, employs large numbers of production shipbuilders in Virginia and Mississippi. Boeing’s median employee earned the most of the seven, $141,933. Companies may choose their own methods for identifying the median employee, so the SEC cautions that pay ratios are not directly comparable across companies.

Federal acquisition rules separately cap how much executive compensation a contractor may charge as an allowable cost on government cost-type contracts. That cap is set annually. The proxy figures in this story are what the companies paid their executives, not what was billed to taxpayers.

Methodology

The Inquisitor pulled each company’s 2026 definitive proxy statement (Form DEF 14A) from the SEC’s EDGAR system. It recorded the “Total” column of the Summary Compensation Table for the person serving as chief executive in 2025, and the median-employee pay and ratio from each company’s pay-ratio disclosure. Defense obligations come from USAspending.gov prime-award data for fiscal 2025, grouped by parent company. They include all Defense Department contract obligations, including modifications and deobligations, and are subject to reporting lags.

Request for comment

The Washington Inquisitor sought comment from Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, HII and L3Harris. This story will be updated with any responses.

Featured image: The Pentagon in Arlington, Va., March 11, 2023. Photo by David, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped.