Regional CEO pay cooled off a little last year, a break from the breakneck increases in compensation that top executives enjoyed in the recent years.

The annual survey of executive pay by The Oregonian finds that among 21 public companies active in Oregon and southwest Washington, most of their CEOs actually earned less in 2022 than they did the year before.

That’s partly because there were fewer big hiring bonuses last year, and fewer stock payouts related to public offerings. The slower growth in pay may also have reflected the poor performance of the state’s public companies on the stock market — many executive bonuses are tied to increases in their companies’ share prices.

Regardless, most executives were still richly compensated. And among companies that disclose worker pay, wage increases tended to be moderate.

Nike is Oregon’s largest company, and CEO John Donahoe made the most of any chief executive in the regional survey. The shoemaker valued his compensation at $32.8 million in its last fiscal year, a 14% increase. That’s despite a difficult year for Nike’s stock, which fell by about 11%.

Donahoe’s $1.5 million base salary didn’t change, but Nike paid him $3.6 million in performance incentives and he got a boost in stock options.

Meanwhile, the median Nike employee actually saw an 11% decrease in pay last year, by the company’s reckoning. That means Donahoe’s compensation was 975 times larger than the median employee’s.

The federal government requires most public companies like Nike to disclose their median employee pay but gives companies considerable latitude in how they do it. Nike defines the median employee as a retail worker in Canada, who earned about $34,000 last year.

So that’s not directly comparable to the corporate employees working at Nike headquarters near Beaverton and it doesn’t say anything about whether they earned more or less in 2022 than they did the prior year.