Executive Compensation Data API: Search CEO Pay from SEC Proxy Filings
If you work in governance research, compensation consulting, investing, board advisory, or business journalism, executive compensation data is only useful when you can compare it quickly and explain the components clearly.
The pay data lives in SEC proxy filings. Recent filings include inline XBRL tags, but the human-readable compensation tables still vary across companies. Older filings are even messier. The important numbers are inside long DEF 14A documents, footnotes, named executive officer tables, director compensation tables, pay-vs-performance sections, and company-specific formatting.
The SEC Executive Compensation MCP server is built so an agent can answer pay questions from structured SEC compensation data instead of making a user dig through proxy filings by hand.
What People Actually Want To Know
Most searches do not start with "parse DEF 14A filings." They start with human questions. How much does this CEO make? How much was salary vs stock awards? What changed year over year? What does the board pay directors? How does one public company compare with another?
The dataset needs to answer those questions without forcing the user to read a 100-page proxy filing first.
Who This Helps
A governance analyst wants the pay story behind a board decision. A compensation consultant wants to compare named executive officers across a peer group. An investor wants to understand whether pay changed with performance. A journalist wants the number and the footnote without spending an afternoon inside EDGAR.
Those users are not asking for a parser. They are asking for a credible first pass: the relevant company, the right filing, the compensation table values, and enough context to know what the number means.
AI Workflow Example
A user asks:
What did the CEO of Apple make last year, and how much of it was stock awards?
That question hides several steps. Resolve the public company. Find the relevant proxy filing. Extract the compensation table values. Separate salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, and other compensation. Explain the components in human language. Compare against another company if the user asks.
This is much more useful than sending the user to EDGAR and making them search within a proxy filing manually.
Where This Belongs
There is a REST surface at /mcp-info/bundle/sec-exec-comp/apidocs, which matters for governance dashboards, investor research tools, compensation benchmarking prototypes, and newsroom workflows. But the post should not lead like a developer manual.
The stronger story is this: a user asks an ordinary pay question, and the agent can answer from structured SEC compensation data instead of guessing from a web snippet.
Questions To Ask
The best questions sound like the work itself:
What did the CEO of Apple make last year, and how much was salary versus stock awards?
Compare CEO compensation across these five public software companies.
Pull the latest director compensation table for this bank.
Summarize how named executive officer pay changed year over year.
What This Is Not
This is not a payroll database. It is not private compensation data. It is not employee salary data from Glassdoor or Levels.fyi.
It is public-company executive compensation extracted from SEC proxy filings. That distinction matters because the user intent is different. The right buyer is not "someone wondering what a CEO makes" in general. The right buyer is someone comparing public-company leadership compensation for research, governance, diligence, or benchmarking.
Related Products
Executive compensation is stronger when connected to other public-company and policy datasets: Federal Lobbying Filings for policy activity by public companies and trade groups, FDIC Bank Lookup for bank institution research, H-1B Visa Data for employer wage and sponsorship context, and Global Sanctions & Watchlists for diligence workflows.
Start with the SEC Executive Compensation MCP server, or use /mcp-info/bundle/sec-exec-comp/apidocs for REST integration.