Every founder hits the same moment: money is coming into the business account, the business is real, and there’s no HR department to tell you what your job is worth. Pay yourself too little and you’re subsidizing the company with an unsustainable personal runway. Pay yourself too much and you’re the founder investors quietly worry about. Neither guess is necessary anymore — two 2026 datasets, pulled from very different populations, give an actual answer.
Kruze Consulting’s 2026 CEO Salary Report is built from real payroll records across its client base of venture-backed startups, not a self-reported survey. Pilot’s 2025 Founder Salary Report surveyed 1,844 founders across industries, funding stages, and geography — a much broader, less VC-skewed sample that includes bootstrapped companies. The two reports tell different stories because they’re describing different founders, and the gap between them is itself the most useful data point in this piece.
What VC-backed CEOs actually get paid, by stage
Kruze’s 2026 numbers, pulled from actual payroll rather than self-reporting, show a clear step function by funding stage:
- Seed: median $153,000 (typical range $130K–$170K), up from $147,000 in 2025 and $132,000 in 2024.
- Series A: median $203,000 (typical range $180K–$230K), up from $179,000 in 2024, roughly flat since 2025.
- Series B: median $216,000 (typical range $200K–$260K).
Across the full dataset, the overall average CEO salary is $165,000 (up from $161,000 in 2025, and well above the low-$140Ks plateau of 2023–24) with an overall median of $159,000. The tight gap between average and median means most CEO salaries cluster in a fairly narrow band at each stage rather than spreading into a long tail — there isn’t a large group of outlier founders quietly paying themselves double the going rate.
The trend line matters as much as the snapshot: seed salaries have risen for three straight years as more capital has come back into early-stage rounds. If you raised your seed round in 2024 and haven’t revisited your own salary since, you’re very likely underpaid relative to where the market moved.
The surprise: CEOs aren’t always the highest-paid executive
The most useful finding in Kruze’s report isn’t the CEO number — it’s who the CEO isn’t. At the seed stage, CTOs earn more on average than CEOs, at roughly $155,000, a reflection of how scarce and expensive technical talent is early on when a non-technical or less-technical founder is competing to hire (or retain) a strong engineering lead. By Series B, the pattern flips again: COOs pull ahead of both, averaging $246,000 against $216,000 for CEOs and $238,000 for CTOs. Boards pay a premium for experienced operators who can run day-to-day execution at scale, and that premium exceeds what they pay the person setting strategy.
The practical takeaway: if you’re a CEO benchmarking your own salary against “founder pay” data, make sure you’re comparing against the CEO line specifically, not a blended executive average — and don’t assume being the top-paid person in the company is normal at every stage. It usually isn’t.
The other half of the picture: what founders overall actually pay themselves
Kruze’s payroll data describes VC-backed startups specifically — a real but narrow slice of the founder population. Pilot’s 2025 survey of 1,844 founders paints a starkly different picture for founders overall: average founder salary fell from $132,000 to $75,000 in a single year, a 43% drop, and the share of founders paying themselves under $100,000 nearly doubled, from 37% to 60%.
That drop lines up with a broader shift toward capital efficiency across 2025 fundraising, plus a compositional change in the survey itself — Pilot noted the share of bootstrapped companies in its sample rose 77% year over year to 18% of respondents. A bootstrapped founder with no institutional funding backstopping payroll behaves very differently than a Series A CEO on a board-approved comp package, and folding both into one “average founder salary” number produces a figure that describes neither group well. This is the same trap the SaaS growth-rate surveys fall into when they pool bootstrapped and venture-backed companies — see our B2B SaaS benchmarks by ARR stage piece for the mechanics of why blended averages mislead both sides.
One more Pilot finding worth acting on directly: founders who set their salary by benchmarking against market-rate data paid themselves 79% more on average than the 31% of founders who set salary based on “what the business can afford.” Affordability is a real constraint, but it’s a ceiling, not a methodology — you still need a market number to know how far below it you actually are.
How to set your own number
There’s no universal formula, but the data above narrows the range enough to build a practical approach:
- Match your dataset to your situation. If you’re VC-backed and past seed, Kruze’s stage-specific medians are your peer set. If you’re bootstrapped or pre-seed, Pilot’s broader survey — and specifically its sub-$100K majority — is the more honest comparison. Benchmarking a bootstrapped business against Series A payroll data will make a sustainable salary look like underpayment.
- Pay yourself as a real line item, not a residual. The Profit First method treats owner’s pay as a fixed allocation taken before operating expenses, which forces the business to actually plan for your salary instead of paying you whatever happens to be left over at month’s end.
- Know how your structure taxes that salary. If you’re running an LLC taxed as an S-Corp, the number you land on doubles as your “reasonable compensation” for IRS purposes — too low and you’re exposed to reclassification risk, too high and you’re paying unnecessary payroll tax. Our LLC vs. S-Corp tax math guide walks through where that line typically falls.
- Revisit it on a schedule, not a whim. Kruze’s own year-over-year data shows seed salaries moved three years running. A number set at your seed round and never revisited is stale by Series A regardless of which direction the market moved.
- Expect the highest-paid seat to change. Budget for a CTO who may need to earn more than you at seed, and for a COO who may earn more than you by Series B — both are normal, board-approved patterns, not signs you’ve lost control of the company.
For a deeper look at how founder compensation decisions interact with equity, control, and the tradeoffs of raising outside capital in the first place, Noam Wasserman’s The Founder’s Dilemmas remains the most rigorous treatment of why founders consistently under- or over-value their own cash comp relative to the equity they’re holding.
FAQ
What is the average startup founder salary in 2026?
It depends heavily on which population you’re measuring. Kruze Consulting’s 2026 payroll data for VC-backed CEOs puts the average at $165,000 and the median at $159,000, rising by stage from $153K at seed to $216K at Series B. Pilot’s broader 2025 survey of 1,844 founders — which includes bootstrapped companies — found average founder salary at $75,000, down 43% year over year. Use the dataset that matches your funding situation rather than a single blended number.
Is $0 salary a red flag to investors?
Not inherently, but a sustained $0 salary can raise questions about personal financial risk and burnout, which investors do care about. Most seed and Series A boards expect the CEO to pay themselves something livable — Kruze’s data shows a $130K–$170K typical range at seed — precisely so the founder isn’t operating under acute personal financial stress while running the company.
Why do CTOs or COOs sometimes earn more than the CEO?
Per Kruze’s 2026 data, CTOs average $155,000 at the seed stage, ahead of CEOs, reflecting how competitive and scarce strong technical talent is early on. By Series B, COOs average $246,000, ahead of both CEOs ($216,000) and CTOs ($238,000), because boards pay a premium for experienced operators who can scale execution. Neither pattern signals a problem — it reflects which skill set is scarcest at each stage.
Should a bootstrapped founder pay themselves a salary?
Yes, and the data suggests most do: Pilot’s 2025 survey found 60% of founders paying themselves under $100,000, not $0. An unpaid founder is quietly financing the business with personal savings or other income, which is a real cost even when it doesn’t appear on the P&L. The Profit First approach of allocating owner’s pay as a fixed percentage works at any revenue level, including pre-revenue, by starting that percentage small and growing it deliberately.
How does founder salary affect my company’s tax structure?
If your business is taxed as an S-Corp, your salary sets your “reasonable compensation” baseline, which determines how much of your income is subject to payroll tax versus distributions. Setting it too low relative to market data is a documented audit trigger; setting it too high forfeits the tax advantage the S-Corp election exists to provide. See our LLC vs. S-Corp tax math guide for where that number typically lands by profit level.
The right founder salary isn’t the highest number the business can technically afford, and it isn’t zero out of founder guilt — it’s a market-benchmarked figure that matches your actual funding situation, set on a schedule and paid like any other line item. For more on the financial decisions that shape a company’s early years, see our founder finance coverage.
