The wealth gap between the richest and poorest people is skyrocketing around the world. There are people whose salary in a single year far exceeds what any other average job could earn by working their entire life. It’s not an exaggeration: it’s what the numbers show.
A report by Oxfam Intermón and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) analyzes the salary data of 1,500 large companies in 33 countries and quantifies the difference between what an average worker earns and what a senior manager earns in Spain: that gap is no longer measured in years of salary, it is measured in centuries.
A century of work to earn the same. According to data from the Oxfam report, in Spain, the general directors of the 12 largest companies in the country earned an average remuneration equivalent to 98 times the national average salary in 2025. That means that an employee in Spain with an average gross salary in Spain of between 27,300 and 31,600 euros would have to work almost an entire century to accumulate what one of those senior managers earns in a single year.
The data in the report is in line with what was included in the fourteenth edition of the remuneration report that was published The Countrywhich stated that the annual salary received by the managers of Ibex 35 companies was 103 times higher than that of their employees.
A gap that has become an abyss. The problem is that the gap is not only enormous, but it is widening every year and risks becoming an unbridgeable abyss.
The average remuneration of CEOs grew by 16% in the last year, while the average salary of workers in Spain only increased by 3.6% in 2025. At a global level the figure is not much better, since the real salary of workers globally fell by 12% between 2019 and 2025 due to inflation and wage stagnation.
What happens in the rest of the world. The data from the report shows that, on a global scale, the situation is not very different, and the 1,500 highest-paid CEOs in the world earned an average of 8.4 million dollars in 2025, compared to 7.6 million the previous year. That represents an increase of 11% in real terms. For an average worker to accumulate that same salary, they would need to work 490 years non-stop.
Meanwhile, the real salary received by the average worker, taking inflation into account, barely rose 0.5% between 2024 and 2025. That means that the highest-paid executives improved their income 20 times faster than their employees.
Real salaries, in free fall since 2019. The data on workers is worrying in itself, regardless of any comparison. Since 2019, workers’ real salaries have fallen by 12% worldwide, which is equivalent to having worked 108 days without pay between 2019 and 2025, 31 of them in the last year alone.
Although the study shows that productivity per worker has grown by 51% since 2004, the part of GDP that goes to salaries has been reduced by 2 percentage points in that same period. Miguel Alba, head of Inequality and the Private Sector at Oxfam Intermón, pointed out that: “The remuneration of senior managers in large companies reaches exorbitant dimensions, far removed from what ordinary people earn to cover living expenses.”
Extreme wealth and a demand for change. The report also points to the growth of large fortunes as part of the same phenomenon. In Spain, the wealth of billionaires increased by 29.5% in the last year, reaching 13.8% of GDP, distributed among 44 billionaires. In contrast, the average net wealth of Spanish households only grew by 3% between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024, according to data from the Bank of Spain collected in the report.
On a global scale, among the largest beneficiaries of dividends in 2025 are Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH, with 3.8 billion dollars, and Amancio Ortega with 3.7 billion dollars (3,234 million euros). Faced with this scenario of extreme differences, Oxfam Intermón and the ITUC call on governments to limit the remuneration of senior managers, to tax the richest more fairly and to guarantee that minimum wages are updated in line with inflation to ensure that employees do not lose purchasing power.
In | Low salaries have ruined the job satisfaction of Spaniards: only 28.7% are satisfied with their job
Image | Unsplash (Muhammed Sultan Ali, Ruthson Zimmerman)
