The Talent War for Scarce Technology Leaders Is Reshaping Indian Executive Pay

CXO India's 2025 Technology Leadership Compensation Study analysed pay data across 190 CTO, CIO, and CDO roles in Indian companies. The findings confirm what most boards and CEOs already sense anecdotally: technology leadership is a seller's market, and the premium for demonstrable enterprise-scale experience is accelerating. The median total compensation for a CTO of a mid-sized Indian technology company (revenues between ₹500 crore and ₹2,000 crore) has increased by 31% over three years in real terms. This is roughly three times the rate of increase for other C-suite roles in the same revenue band. The premium reflects genuine scarcity: the pool of Indian technology leaders who have successfully built and scaled engineering organisations, managed complex technology migrations, and contributed credibly to board-level strategy discussions remains small relative to the demand from companies undergoing digital transformation. The compensation structure is also evolving. Boards that are serious about retaining technology leaders are moving beyond base salary and annual bonus towards multi-year equity structures — ESOPs and RSU programmes — that align the CTO's financial interests with the company's long-term outcomes. This shift has been slower to arrive in India than in global technology markets, but it is now clearly underway. The companies that are losing technology leaders to competitors — or to international markets — are disproportionately those that have been slow to implement equity-based retention.