Take it on the chin SatNad: Microsoft chief exec's pay slips 6% in record year

Revenue up, operating profit up, 30 million paid Copilot seats locked in, 88 DCs added, $43.8 billion returned to shareholders

Sometimes you’ve just got to roll with the punches. Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella was knocked down recently: his total compensation for the corporation’s fiscal 2026 is 6 percent lighter than it was in the prior year. 

The leader of the software and cloud biz pocketed $90.6 million, including a $2.5 million base salary, $77.6 million in stock awards, $10.3 million non-equity incentive plan compensation and $259,203 in all other compensation (chiefly security for personal travel, charitable gifts and pension contributions). 

As Reg readers are no doubt be aware, stock vests at a different rate annually and in the latest full-year Nadella was awarded a lower figure, despite breezing through all of his financial and operational targets. 

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Revenue for Microsoft's fiscal 2026 ended June 30 was up 18 percent to $331.8 billion and operating profit was 18 percent higher - at $155.237 billion - than SatNad's $130.96 billion target. Together, these areas accounted for 70 percent of the bossman’s remuneration goals. Operational assessment including security, strategic transformation and culture made up the rest. 

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The executive pay scale was outlined in the Notice of Annual Shareholder Meeting and Proxy Statement 2026. 

Other highlights in that financial year included a 27 percent bounce in revenue generated by the Cloud division to $214.4 billion. Microsoft added 88 datacenters to its portfolio, and had 30 million paid Copilot seats. 

"The scale of adoption reflects growing customer confidence in Microsoft's ability to deliver enterprise-ready AI capabilities integrated directly into existing workflows. Microsoft also delivered 625 Copilot updates during the year, reflecting its rapid pace of innovation and commitment to customer feedback," Microsoft claimed. 

"Large-scale enterprise deployments accelerated across industries, with the number of customers deploying Copilot broadly across their organizations continuing to increase as Copilot evolved from an AI assistant into a platform for agentic work."

GitHub captured 225 million users - 50 million of these used Copilot, with one in three "pull requests involving an agent." Industry-specific AI services expanded, such as Dragon Copilot for healthcare, now used by "100,000 healthcare providers to help automate administrative and clinical workflows."

The rest of the C-suite's compensation went in the opposite direction to Nadella, and saw their packages increase, though they aren't nearly as well off as the CEO, who got the top job in 2014. CFO Amy Hood, was awarded $33.7 million, up from $29.5 million. The beancounting bigwig returned $43.8 billion to shareholders in the 12 months. 

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s Commercial Business was awarded $33.4 million, and chief marketing officer Takeshi Numoto - the person that also works on product bundles - was awarded $15.7 million. President Brad Smith was compensated to the tune of $33 million. 

Like we’ve said before, it’s tough at the top. Nadella’s pay was equivalent to the average pay ($215,057) of 420 Microsoft employees. 

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Still, the pressure of running one of the biggest organizations on the planet must be a big load to carry, especially when Microsoft is spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure and looking to find massive cost savings by erasing up to a quarter of the workforce. 

The annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for December 8 when investors will get a chance to have their say on exec pay. 91 percent voted in favor last year so it seems unlikely any dissenting voices will be heard at the upcoming event.  ®