A2 Milk’s David Bortolussi – second last year in the pay ranking – retains his position, trailing Miles with earnings of $7.7m.
Gary Miles joined Gentrack in 2020 and is credited with turning around the business. He was rewarded with an investive scheme that last year saw him take home $17.3m – a record pay packet for a listed New Zealand company boss. Photo / NZME
Gentrack is a lower-mid-table NZX50 company, with a market capitalisation of around $800m, compared to others on the index that have valuations in the tens of billions. Gentrack provides software for running airports and utilities and does most of its business offshore.
Hammered during Covid, which saw its airport customers freeze spending as international travel withered, its shares were at one stage in 2020 worth only $1.20.
Miles’ lucrative incentive package was approved by a majority of shareholders at a special meeting in October 2023. The scheme was slated to deliver bonus shares for Miles as Gentrack’s stock price rose above $5 (at the time of the special meeting, they were at $4.80) and capped out at $10 a share.
During the 2025 financial year, the company’s shares hit a high of $14.20, delivering Miles maximum returns. But despite the incentive scheme running through until 2026, it seems unlikely Miles will again be breathing the rarified air of this year. Gentrack’s share price has been declining since the start of 2025 and last week closed at $6.75.
New Zealand Shareholders Association (NZSA) chief executive Oliver Mander said he had raised concerns at the time of the special vote over the possible size of Miles’ future pay packet.
“We were concerned about the possible quantum of the award, and that has certainly come to pass as we expected. At the time, we felt that hurdle rates were a bit low, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think most would agree with that,” he said.
Veteran chairman Rob Campbell said while he had no special insight into Gentrack’s inner workings, Miles’ pay packet last year certainly caught the eye.
“You’d have to say it does seem to be a bit of an outlier. I don’t know the business any more than the average person in the street does, so I can’t really comment on the specifics of that, but it certainly skews the numbers quite a bit in the market. No doubt,” he said.
Heartland Group Holdings chief executive Jeff Greenslade left his job in 2024, but still had the sixth-largest ceo pay of 2025, thanks to a $4.1m “retirement payment”.
Greenslade’s pay packet for the 2025 financial year was enough to see him claim sixth place on the list of highest-paid chief executives, despite retiring from Heartland in September 2024.
Having earned $1.1m in 2024, almost entirely from base salary, in 2025, he collected $571,891 in salary for the part-year he worked as well as a $4,128,398 “retirement payment” consisting of $4m in cash and another $144,750 in non-cash benefits.
Greenslade had been chief executive of Heartland since its founding in 2011. He had previously been chief executive of Marac Finance, which was one of four finance companies folded into the new entity, and he oversaw Heartland’s registration as a fully-fledged bank in 2012.
Disclosures suggest Greenslade will now be able to be comfortable in his golden years, with Heartland disclosures noting his base salary had long included a 3% employer contribution to his KiwiSaver.
Campbell said a case could be made for, and against, such golden goodbye handshakes.
“I don’t know detail, really, inside Heartland Bank, but if you take Jeff, he was chief executive at a period of time when that business did grow immensely and became a bank and improved its performance … if that was being done in anticipation that there would be such a payment, then I guess you would say it worked as an incentive in that case,” he says.
But, more generally, Campbell says incentives should focus minds on the future, not reward the past: “Paying incentives for someone’s on the way out the back door is a bit arse-about-face, if you can use that expression in the Herald.”
Removing the outliers Miles and Greenslade from the analysis shows the vast majority of chief executives on the NZX50 had a much more austere year, with average pay rising by only 1.73%, less than inflation, to $2.5m.
Vittoria Shortt is New Zealand’s highest-paid female CEO.
And earnings required to make the top 10 list actually declined. Last year, ASB Bank New Zealand chief executive Vittoria Shortt occupied fourth place and became the first woman to earn more than $5m while running a listed New Zealand company.
This year, despite Shortt seeing her pay packet decline by more than a quarter to $3.75m – largely due to the exchange rate – she remains the highest-paid woman on this list in seventh place, outpacing fellow bank chief executive Antonia Watson from ANZ, with the pair the only two women in the top 10.
Recently departed Ebos chief executive John Cullity – last year’s biggest earner – was this year in third place, largely from $3.1m earned from a 2021 incentive scheme that saw shares vest last year.
When the Herald first started its CEO Pay Survey more than a decade ago, disclosures were limited. Recent years have seen vastly more information made public, particularly around how long- and short-term incentives are structured, as well as distinctions drawn between pay earned and paid out over the period.
The reason for this disclosure is not selfless transparency. In late 2023, the NZX published a template for listed companies to improve corporate disclosures around CEO remuneration, and while not mandatory, it has been widely adopted.
The NZSA’s Mander said its widespread uptake was largely down to awareness that listed companies in Australia are mandated to make even more detailed and onerous disclosures. Voluntary transparency, it seems, has been seen as the path of least resistance.
Mander says the exchange had “set in place a clear set of tramlines for NZX companies to follow that provide the right balance between the right disclosure for investors in New Zealand, while also making sure that it can keep it as simple as possible”.
Some of the recent executive pay disclosures show exactly how much work goes on behind the scenes at board level in hammering out the top level of employment agreements. Fonterra’s agreement with Hurrell, for instance, fills eight pages of the dairy giant’s annual report.
Campbell says these complex arrangements aren’t only now being revealed by disclosures, but are a recent development.
“The agreements for chief executive pay have been getting more complex in recent years,” he says.
Campbell notes the tide towards complex incentives seems to be turning as directors realise that over-quantifying performance can result in sidelining the qualitative. “There is just, in more recent times, some of that complexity starting to reduce,” he says.
“I think there has been a recognition that the drive for very complicated pay incentive structures isn’t necessarily the beneficial thing that it was thought to be. It’s had the effect in many companies of narrowing the perspective of senior executives and kind of limiting the range of options that they look at.”
Mander says while the NZSA may sometimes take issue with the size of incentive arrangements, it was generally in favour of aligning the interests of management with shareholders – and extending such schemes beyond the chief executives, because big business is inevitably a team effort.
“We view very favourably share or incentives schemes applicable to a wider group of people at a company,” he says.
Almost every executive surveyed has a substantial proportion of their possible pay packet – in some cases, more than 100% of their base salary – tied up to performance targets. This can see remarkable volatility at the top, best illustrated by Miles’ bumper bonus share package, seeing him more than triple his earnings, increasing by 371% from 2024.
Vulcan Steel managing director Rhys Jones saw his earnings more than double in 2025 after his base pay got bumped 20% to $1.5m and $2m in performance share rights were vested, whereas the previous year, he had received no bonus issues.
Grant Watson, formerly of Synlait, was, like Greenslade, amongst the biggest risers due to a retirement package. He departed the milk company in October 2024, but his pay for the 2025 financial year included $1m in “annual leave and discretionary payments”.
At the other end of the spectrum, chief executives facing the largest declines in pay packets tended to be at companies experiencing headwinds – or declines from earlier peaks.
NZME chief executive Michael Boggs (NZME is the publisher of the Herald) saw the largest decline in remuneration paid last year, largely because of receiving no share issue during the period. (Notes to the accounts show Boggs did receive an issue on January 5, a week after the balance date.)
In 2025, NZME had come under sustained pressure from shareholders complaining of substandard performance, culminating in agitator Jim Grenon joining the board and rolling the incumbent chair.
The swings and roundabouts of executive pay do raise the question of how responsible CEOs are for the performance – or underperformance – of their companies: are our ultimate business heroes really worth $17.3m?
Campbell says there is an increasing awareness at board level that managing an executive needs to be balanced as to how potentially massive pay packets will be seen on company shop floors, and around water-coolers more generally.
“In recent times, it would be surprising at a board meeting discussing chief executive remuneration, or indeed director remuneration, that there wasn’t some reference to what the outside perception of this would be.”
Veteran director and chairman Rob Campbell says boards need to be careful not to be entranced by the idea of a “hero CEO”.
Campbell says he doesn’t like the term “social licence to operate” but feels it best describes this tension.
He also says boards need to be aware that bumping the pay of their chief executive will lead to wider growth in staff costs for an organisation, as pay growth can ripple.
“Senior executive pay can be a kind of automatic escalator where you find … chief executive pay also dragging up the pay of their direct reports. And it’s a process which is quite strong at the top and for some unfathomable reason, it only trickles down and at the bottom, you may not feel it at all,” he says.
And more fundamentally, Campbell thinks there is perhaps an overemphasis on the importance of the role of chief executive.
“I think that there’s been a flow-on into the local market of this idea of the hero CEO who’s capable of making great changes. Your CEO is very important, but I’ve never yet seen a CEO on their own who was able to make a significant difference in a company. There’s obviously factors much wider, much wider than that, and those are actually also quite hard for the board to see,” he says.
“As you know, a board typically only has an employment relationship directly with the chief executive.”
Behind the story
For decades, the Herald has annually surveyed the earnings of the chief executives of New Zealand’s largest companies, spending weeks analysing financial reports and reading the fine print to see what the top end of town is taking home.
While the companies surveyed have differing balance dates, annual reports dated in the 2025 calendar year were assessed, providing a broadly comparable snapshot in time. Accounts reported in Australian dollars were converted to New Zealand dollars using the exchange rate at the time of the company’s year-end balance date.
The survey covers all companies in the NZX50 as well as Fonterra, given its size, and Herald publisher NZME, for transparency.
Over time, the Herald’s underlying dataset, combined with company performance metrics, has grown to provide valuable insights into long-term trends for executive remuneration and identify high-flying – and crashing-and-burning – outliers.
Combined with our teams’ specialist industry expertise and a collective contacts book that extends into almost every boardroom in the country, the CEO Pay Survey is the best of business journalism.
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter and ICIJ member covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting for business newspapers and national magazines
Stay ahead with the latest market moves, corporate updates, and economic insights by subscribing to our Business newsletter – your essential weekly round-up of all the business news you need.