Game File's new tallest chart ever
EA's CEO did really well this year, so I needed more pixels.
The chart atop this article is not Game File’s tallest chart ever.
It’s the short version, crunched down for you to see the latest comparison of the compensation earned by Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson vs. the average EA worker.
And, yes, you’re reading it right. There are two very different totals for Wilson’s 2026 compensation.
By one measure, Wilson made $39 million in 2026, via a mix of cash and stock awards (mostly the latter).
That figure was reported widely last week, based on new EA financial disclosures for the company’s fiscal year ended March 2026. (I was on vacation!)
The other figure, via a relatively new, fairly controversial U.S. government metric labeled as “compensation actually paid,” hasn’t made the rounds as much among the public, best I can tell. It puts Wilson’s 2026 comp at… $77 million.
Figures like that necessitated I update the very tall, very vital compensation comparison chart I published last year. The chart had compared several years’ worth of Wilson’s compensation to the average EA worker’s. There’s a big gap. Make your own judgments about whether there should be.
Lat year, I needed 15,000 pixels to show that comparison in a way that let readers see any ups and downs in the bottom-most line showing EA worker pay.
This year, to keep things comparable, I needed 30,000 pixels.
I’m about to show you this chart, but I need you to brace yourself.
In fact, I’m going to prep you for that chart with another chart:
You see?
New chart = way taller.
Ready…..set… scroll! And then keep reading, because this requires a bit more explanation.
Hello, again. You made it!
Here, at the bottom of the chart, we can see that the median compensation for EA’s workers went up this year, from $117,000/year to $127,000/year. The worker pay is also a mix of cash and stock awards, which can cause fluctuations. EA had used the same worker for their median pay measure for a few years, but used a new one for 2026.
Back to Wilson’s compensation: We’ve got two radically different numbers to work with: $39 million and $77 million.
Which is it?
There’s no easy answer.
Most news outlets, and the companies reporting these figures themselves, tend to prefer the traditional way of calculating compensation, which results in the $39 million figure. It’s up from $31 million the year before (easily seen in the chart at the top of this post).
The breakdown for that 2026 EA CEO compensation figure:
$1.3 million base salary (unchanged from 2025)
$6.5 million cash bonus (up from $2.8 million in 2025), tied to such things as “meeting all milestones for a high-quality launch of Battlefield 6”1, attracting/retaining talent, “executing a bold GenAI strategy” and selling the company for $55 billion to a consortium of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund
$28.5 million worth of performance-based and time-based stock awards
$2.4 million in other compensation for things such as private jet travel, which included up to 75 hours worth of personal trips—allowable thanks to the recommendation of a June 2025 “independent security assessment”
The $77 million “actually paid” version of Wilson’s compensation includes the same cash amounts for salary and bonus, but it calculates the stock awards at a much higher rate, working off of the $202 stock price at the end of EA’s fiscal year. (It was below $150 a year before that.)
The “compensation actually paid (CAP)” metric was implemented by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 as a way to give investors more information about how leaders are paid vs. how a company is doing. For some companies, CAP has consistently been far higher than the old way of measuring CEO pay (hence the corporate grumbling about the stat). In EA’s case, Wilson’s CAP had been lower than his traditionally reported compensation. That situation flipped, radically, in 2026.
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Companies have complained about the CAP measurement, saying it does not represent what their CEOs are actually paid. The SEC’s argument has been that calculating stock awards in a way that factors in the company’s year-end stock price gets much closer to showing what an executive is likely to get from their stock awards.
The reason there isn’t a definitive answer to which calculation is better is because the payouts for these awards can vary widely over time.
Each year, Wilson and other CEOs of publicly traded companies are granted millions of dollars worth of stock awards that are subject to multi-year performance goals and/or multi-year waiting periods. The idea is that the CEO’s potential increase in wealth is incumbent on them leading the company to success and on them staying in their role.
In EA’s case, there’s the added twist of the video game company having just been sold to private investors. That $55 billion deal closed this week. Among the terms of the deal is that, by default, stock awards are converted to “restricted cash awards,” subject to some performance and time-based thresholds, and paid out at a rate tied to the $210/per share final sale price of the stock. That bodes well for anyone getting stock/restricted-cash awards.
With EA having gone private, the company is no longer obligated to report the compensation of its executives. This is therefore the last we’ll probably hear from EA about its CEO’s pay or that of its workers. We just won’t know if EA suddenly closes the CEO-worker gap and starts paying each game developer millions of dollars on average.
And that, alas, means there probably won’t be an EA Tall Chart for 2027. End of a brief era…
EA’s Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game in the U.S. in 2025. EA laid off workers from its Battlefield development teams in March 2026. An EA rep told IGN at the time: "We’ve made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community.”
There is no meaningful difference between $38 million and $77 million in a YEAR, in terms of impact on the life of the person who received it. "Oh, I can buy another yacht." Whatever.
There is a very meaningful difference, though, for the thousands of EA employees laid off under Wilson's "leadership." How many of them could still be employed if Wilson took a "modest" pay cut? Or just, you know, got paid fairly relative to the work he actually does?
You've really outdone yourself with the chart, Stephen. Absolutely love it!