Visa CEO Ryan McInerney earned 254 times the median employee’s pay in 2025, outpacing Mastercard and PayPal.
Visa CEO Ryan McInerney’s total compensation for 2025 reached $31.56m, up from $26m in 2024, making it the largest pay package of his career.
McInerney became CEO of the payments giant in February 2023 following more than a decade at the company, where he oversaw the company’s global business as president.
Before joining Visa in 2013, McInerney was a principal consultant at McKinsey & Company, focusing on retail banking and payments. He later became CEO of consumer banking at JPMorgan Chase, managing over 75,000 employees and a business generating $14bn in revenue at the time.
At Visa, he has led global client relationships, product management and new solutions groups before rising to the role of President and then CEO.
According to Visa’s 2026 proxy statement, McInerney’s 2025 compensation included a base salary of $1.5m, non-equity incentive plan payouts of $5.25m, stock awards valued at $18.7m and additional benefits and perquisites totaling around $373,000.
The filing also highlights Visa’s 2025 results, with revenue growing 11% to $40bn, while Visa-branded transactions reached 329 billion, averaging 901 million per day. These results were a key driver of McInerney’s performance-based incentives and the record stock awards included in his package.
Breaking down his pay, roughly 60% came from stock awards and performance shares, 17% from non-equity incentive plans, 5% from benefits and perquisites and the remainder from base salary.
Rising pay across the sector
Visa is not alone in increasing executive compensation in recent years, with PayPal CEO Alex Chriss earning $41.9m in total compensation during his first partial year in 2023, largely due to substantial onboarding stock grants.
His cash compensation, including salary and incentives, was roughly $800,000, with ongoing annual pay estimated at $6.66m in later filings. First-year packages like Chriss’ are high due to stock grants, but ongoing pay remains heavily weighted toward performance-based incentives.
Meanwhile, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach received $30.1m in 2024, up 17% from the previous year. His base salary is around $5.61m, with additional bonuses and long-term equity awards linked to performance.
Visa’s median employee earned $124,000 in 2025, meaning CEO McInerney’s total pay of $31.56m was roughly 254 times higher. At PayPal, the median employee earned $95,903 in 2024, putting CEO Chriss’ pay at 69 times that amount, though this will rise when stock awards are included. At Mastercard, the median employee earned $120,501, making Miebach’s 2024 pay 250 times higher.
Mastercard and PayPal’s proxy statement’s for 2026 have not yet been published.
Visa’s strategic direction
If McInerney can sustain Visa’s current momentum, his compensation is likely to rise again. Based on the strategy he outlined last week, the company is preparing for another successful period.
McInerney described 2025 as a moment of “fundamental rewiring” in global payments, with Visa changing from just a card network to a “network of networks” linking cards, accounts, wallets and emerging payment rails.
McInerney said key to this evolution is Visa‑as‑a‑Service, a modular platform spanning tokenisation, identity, risk analytics, issuer tools and account‑to‑account money movement.
He went on to explain there are two trends which sit at the heart of this strategy. The first is the rise of agentic commerce, where AI systems begin transacting on behalf of consumers. Visa has already moved to support this with its Trusted Agent Protocol, designed to give AI agents secure payment credentials.
The second is tokenisation, which now powers more than half of Visa’s ecommerce transactions and has reduced fraud while lifting authorisation rates.
