How to Hire a CEO in India

Short answer: A CEO hire fails in the matching, long before it fails in the package. In FY2025-26 annual reports, the median total remuneration disclosed for a CEO or Managing Director was ₹1.17 crore at companies with revenue under ₹1,000 crore (43 companies), ₹4.12 crore at ₹1,000–5,000 crore (37 companies), ₹10.6 crore at ₹5,000–10,000 crore (15 companies) and ₹9.82 crore at ₹10,000–50,000 crore (23 companies). Those are annual-report medians. They are not survey figures, and they are not blended with surveys. Pay is the part you can look up. Fit is the part you have to test.

I'm Vinay Pasricha. I run GoodSpace AI, a hiring company in Noida, and I wrote Organizational Frequency. This is what I would tell a founder or a board that has decided the next seat is the chief executive.

Decide which job you are actually filling

"CEO" covers at least three different seats, and people pretend it is one.

• The founder is still the chief executive and wants a professional CEO beside or after them. The real question is what the founder will stop doing.
• The board needs a successor for a promoter who is leaving, or staying as chairman. The real question is who holds the relationships that do not appear on the organisation chart.
• The company needs an operator because the founder is the constraint. The real question is whether the founder will accept being the constraint.

Write that down before you meet anyone. A search that cannot say which of the three it is will attract people who are excellent at the other two.

What listed companies disclosed in FY2025-26

Every figure in this section is a median from FY2025-26 annual reports of listed Indian companies. Each underlying value was checked against the report page it came from. A group is shown only when at least 10 companies disclosed a usable amount. The unit is total remuneration as disclosed, which may include commission, perquisites and the perquisite value of stock options. No company and no person is named.

Survey figures from Deloitte, Michael Page and others are a different measurement. They stay on the India Leadership Pay Benchmark, in their own section. Do not average them with these medians.

Revenue above ₹50,000 crore is not published: that band does not yet have 10 companies in this set. Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune do not have a published cell for any role. City means the registered office, which is not always the head office. The same cells, with the method, are on CEO and MD pay at listed companies. Download every published cell (CSV).

Notice what the table refuses to do. Pay does not rise in a straight line. The median at ₹5,000–10,000 crore of revenue is ₹10.6 crore. The median one band higher is ₹9.82 crore, with a middle half that runs from ₹4.63 crore to ₹28.97 crore. Quoting one Indian CEO salary is how boards fool themselves.

Promoter and professional, indicative only

Where the annual report says, professional CEOs and MDs had a median of ₹6.1 crore (28 companies; middle half ₹1.09 crore to ₹10.24 crore) and promoter CEOs and MDs a median of ₹2.85 crore (45 companies; middle half ₹1.21 crore to ₹8.56 crore). Forty-eight reports do not say which they are. The ranges overlap. I would not hire, or price an offer, on that split. It is a clue that the two populations are mixed together in the revenue table, not a rule that professionals cost ₹6.1 crore.

What the number is for

Use the row that matches the company's revenue, and treat the city row as context for the registered office, not as the head-office market. A board hiring into a company under ₹1,000 crore of revenue is looking at a median of ₹1.17 crore and a middle half that already stretches from ₹43 lakh to ₹2.34 crore. That spread is the point. The package is a negotiation inside a wide band. It is not a formula.

If the company is unlisted, say so, and still do not invent a median. These cells are the annual-report reference. They are not a startup survey. Keep any survey number on the benchmark page, labelled as a survey.

The test that matters

A resume tells you what someone has already survived. It does not tell you whether they can be the chief executive of this company. The failure mode I see most often is a talented operator from a slower, more staffed environment dropped into a founder-led company that still runs on the founder's week. Six months later the board calls it a performance problem. It was a frequency mismatch. That is the argument of Organizational Frequency: most hiring failures are resonance failures disguised as performance failures.

For a CEO, I want evidence on four things, taken from the company rather than from a generic competency list.

• Pace. Can they decide at the speed the company actually moves, including the ugly decisions the founder has been delaying?
• What they do with the founder. If the founder stays, the design of that relationship is the job. Ask for a time they took over from a founder and what each person stopped doing. A polished answer with no scar is not evidence.
• The register of the company. A manufacturer in its second generation and a product company that still changes its mind every Monday do not need the same chief executive, even when the revenue looks similar.
• Whether your best people would work for them. Not "do they interview well with the board." Whether the operators who already carry the place would stay.

What a bad hire really costs in India walks through why the salary is the small number when this seat goes wrong. A wrong CEO takes other people with them.

How I would run it

1. Understand the company before you understand the candidates. Name the pace, the decision style, the ambiguity, and the thing the outgoing chief executive was quietly doing. Until that is written, every interview is theatre.
2. Discover. Look past the companies on the CV. Ask what they changed in the first six months, what they refused to change, and who disagreed. The hiring path is the longer version of this stage.
3. Validate in the real environment. A day with the people who will report to them, on a live problem, beats a sequence of board conversations. Interviews measure the performance of fit. You want the fit.
4. Grow both, or separate cleanly. A CEO and a company move. The first year needs a written account of what success is, and an honest review when the frequencies do not meet. Hoping is not a plan.

When to run a search

A board that already has two people it trusts can have the conversation directly. A board that is choosing from whoever will take a call from the chairman is not choosing. Leadership search is the work GoodSpace does for this seat, built from the company's frequency rather than from a stack of CEO titles.

If the seat you are circling is actually finance, read How to hire a CFO in India. The published cells are thinner, and the mismatch looks different. The book behind both pieces is Organizational Frequency.

FAQ

How much does a CEO earn in a listed Indian company?

In FY2025-26 annual reports, the median total remuneration for a CEO or Managing Director was ₹1.17 crore at revenue under ₹1,000 crore (43 companies), ₹4.12 crore at ₹1,000–5,000 crore (37), ₹10.6 crore at ₹5,000–10,000 crore (15) and ₹9.82 crore at ₹10,000–50,000 crore (23). Revenue above ₹50,000 crore is not published. These medians are not blended with surveys.

Which city pays CEOs the most?

Among registered offices with at least 10 disclosures, the medians are Delhi NCR ₹4.16 crore (26 companies), Mumbai ₹3.96 crore (29), Ahmedabad ₹3.64 crore (12) and Kolkata ₹2.4 crore (10). Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune are not published. Registered office is not always the head office, and the middle half in Mumbai and Delhi NCR runs well above and well below the median. Do not rank cities by the median alone.

Are professional CEOs paid more than promoter CEOs?

Where the report says, the professional median is ₹6.1 crore (28 companies) and the promoter median is ₹2.85 crore (45 companies). Forty-eight reports do not say. The ranges overlap. Treat the split as indicative only.