The Advisors' Blog

I shared a few weeks ago that say-on-pay failures are down 20% this year. We’ve been seeing strong support all season, and this Pay Governance alert confirms that it’s shaping up to be one of the strongest in recent history. Here are the key takeaways:

– Average S&P 500 SOP support reached 90.3%, the only time above 90% in the past 5 years. The percentage of companies receiving at least 90% support increased to 74%, compared with 70% in 2025 and 67% in 2022.

– Low support is less prevalent. Only 5% of companies received less than 70% support in 2026, down from 11% in 2022.

– Strong S&P 500 total shareholder return (TSR) coincided with favorable SOP results. Since 2024, SOP failures have remained at 1% of S&P 500 proposals while one-, three-, and five-year TSR results were strongly positive.

– Influence of proxy advisor SOP opposition continues to deteriorate. Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) opposition declined to 9% year-over-year, while Glass Lewis (GL) opposition increased slightly to 13%. When both proxy advisors opposed SOP this season, only 19% failed to receive majority shareholder support, down from 50% in 2022.

– The “big five” investors continue to take a selective approach to opposing S&P 500 SOP proposals and rely heavily on their proprietary voting frameworks. Top asset managers supported SOP at a rate of 95.6% in 2026 and deviated from proxy advisor SOP opposition in an overwhelming majority of cases.

– As the proxy voting landscape continues to evolve, understanding investor expectations and effectively communicating rationale for compensation decisions is critical to strengthening SOP support.

That last point is important, because it means that engagement will continue to be very important even as the headline results look strong. Meredith recently blogged about how to make the most of off-season engagement.

– Liz Dunshee