Twice as many top American companies reportedly increased their chiefs’ pay in fiscal 2016 as cut it.

Median pay for the chief executives of 104 of the biggest American companies rose 6.8% for fiscal 2016 to $11.5 million, on track to set a postrecession record, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

“Twice as many companies increased their chiefs’ pay as reduced it, though a few high-profile bosses took substantial pay cuts, including Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook and General Electric Co.’s Jeff Immelt,” the Journal reported.

“The results, representing about a fifth of the S&P 500, suggest the 2015 slowdown in chief executive pay was temporary. Median annual pay for a broader sample of CEOs, disclosed last year, fell to $10.8 million in fiscal 2015, with most getting a pay cut or a raise of less than 1.5%,” the Journal said.

The higher pay was doled out as the stock market notched strong gains and corporate profits rebounded over the course of 2016. “If ever there was going to be a good year for CEO pay, it was going to be 2016,” said David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who studies executive pay.

And there has been other recent evidence that American corporate bosses continue to get bigger raises than their workers, Bloomberg reported.

Chief executive officers at 42 public U.S. companies that have filed proxy statements for fiscal 2016 saw their pay packages grow by a median of 5.5 percent from the prior year, according to a report issued by Compensation Advisory Partners, a consulting firm.

That compares with the 2.8 percent increase in December from a year earlier for average hourly earnings of private non-farm employees, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

(Newsmax wires services contributed to this report).

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