Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr Salary in 2026

Carsten Spohr, Chairman and CEO of Lufthansa Group, has a legally capped maximum annual compensation of €11.0 million, set by Lufthansa’s Supervisory Board under Section 87a of Germany’s Stock Corporation Act (Lufthansa Group Investor Relations). His most recently disclosed total pay — combining salary, bonus, and share-based long-term incentives — was reported at approximately €8.83 million, according to compensation data compiled by Simply Wall St from S&P Global Market Intelligence filings. That puts him at or near the top of the pay table among Europe’s major airline-group chief executives — though, as this article explains, the honest comparison is trickier than most coverage suggests.

Who Is Carsten Spohr?

Carsten Spohr was born on December 16, 1966, in Wanne-Eickel, Germany. He studied industrial engineering and management at the University of Karlsruhe and later trained as a commercial pilot at Lufthansa’s own flight schools in Bremen and at the Airline Training Center in Arizona — a license he has kept current, qualifying him to fly the Airbus A320.

After a brief stint at Deutsche Aerospace AG, Spohr joined Lufthansa in 1994. He spent several years as personal assistant to the airline’s then-CEO before moving into regional partnership management and was named CEO of Lufthansa Cargo in 2007. He joined Lufthansa’s Executive Board in 2011, and on May 1, 2014, he succeeded Christoph Franz as Chairman and CEO of Deutsche Lufthansa AG — a position he still holds today. His contract has since been renewed twice, in 2019 and again in 2023, extending his tenure through roughly 2028.

Under Spohr, Lufthansa Group has absorbed the COVID-19 crisis and a €9 billion state bailout (since fully repaid), pushed through a major restructuring of its low-cost and premium brands, rolled out the Allegris long-haul cabin concept, and taken a 41% stake in Italy’s ITA Airways in January 2025.

How Lufthansa Actually Pays Its CEO

Unlike many of the “estimated” figures circulating online, Lufthansa’s executive pay structure is public record, disclosed annually in a Compensation Report filed under Section 162 of the German Stock Corporation Act (AktG). The system has four components:

1. Fixed basic remuneration — paid in twelve monthly installments.
2. Short-term incentive (STI) — an annual bonus weighted 40% to Adjusted EBIT and Adjusted Free Cash Flow, and 20% to non-financial “business and sustainability” targets such as customer and employee satisfaction scores, with payout ranging from 0% to 200% of target.
3. Long-term incentive (LTI) — multi-year, share-price-linked awards tied to Adjusted ROCE, relative total shareholder return, and strategic/sustainability goals over a four-year performance period.
4. Pension contribution — a fixed annual credit to a defined-contribution pension account, which for Spohr has stood at €990,000 per year since 2023.

A revised remuneration system took effect on January 1, 2025, approved by 96.54% of shareholder votes at the May 6, 2025 Annual General Meeting.

The legal pay cap

Since 2023, Lufthansa’s Supervisory Board has enforced a hard statutory ceiling on total annual pay for each Executive Board member. For the Chairman of the Executive Board — Spohr’s role — that ceiling is €11.0 million a year, covering every component including pension commitments. If total pay in a given year would exceed that figure, the variable (bonus and LTI) components are automatically reduced to bring it back under the cap. This €11 million is a legal maximum, not a typical outcome — actual realized pay has consistently landed well below it.

What Spohr Has Actually Been Paid

Real, disclosed figures — not projections — tell a more grounded story than the “€9–11 million” round numbers that circulate in aviation blogs:

• 2023 financial year: Total CEO compensation was reported at €5.6 million, up 9.1% year-on-year, of which the fixed salary component was roughly €1.9 million — meaning more than half of Spohr’s pay that year came from variable, performance-linked elements. That analysis noted Spohr was paid above the median for CEOs at comparable German-listed airline-sized companies.
• 2024 financial year: Lufthansa Group’s own compensation disclosures confirm Spohr’s fixed pension credit remained at €990,000, while the Group’s underlying financial performance softened — full-year net income fell to €1.39 billion (down 28% year-on-year) after roughly €450 million in strike-related disruption costs, which weighed on his bonus outcome for that year.
• Most recently disclosed total: Compensation data aggregated by Simply Wall St from S&P Global filings puts Spohr’s latest reported total annual compensation at €8.83 million, split roughly 21% fixed salary and 79% bonus/share-based pay.

Why 2026 pay is likely to trend toward the higher end

Lufthansa Group just posted its strongest financial year on record. In the 2025 financial year, revenue rose 5% to €39.6 billion — a company record — while Adjusted EBIT, the key metric driving Spohr’s short-term bonus, jumped 19% to €1.96 billion, lifting the operating margin to 4.9%. The Group carried 135 million passengers, and Lufthansa Cargo’s operating profit rose almost 30%.

Because roughly 60% of Spohr’s target STI is tied directly to Adjusted EBIT and free cash flow, a year like this typically pushes realized bonus payouts well above a weak year like 2024 — though the precise 2025 compensation figures will only become final once Lufthansa Group publishes its next detailed Compensation Report ahead of the May 2026 Annual General Meeting.

Put together, a €9–11 million range for Spohr’s total 2025/2026 realized pay is a reasonable estimate given the improved financial results — but it remains an estimate pending the official disclosure, not a confirmed figure.

Peer Comparison: Who Actually Compares to Spohr?

This is where most coverage of Spohr’s pay goes wrong. Spohr isn’t the CEO of a single airline — he’s the CEO of the holding company that owns Lufthansa Airlines, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, Lufthansa Cargo, and Lufthansa Technik. The fair comparison is with other group-level CEOs, not with executives who run a single subsidiary airline inside a larger group.

The like-for-like comparison — group CEO to group CEO — puts Spohr’s most recent disclosed total (~€8.8M) modestly ahead of Gallego’s £4.6M (~€5.3M at current exchange rates)* and Benjamin Smith’s €5.1M. That gap is consistent with Lufthansa Group being the largest of the three by revenue: it posted €39.6 billion in 2025 revenue against IAG’s and Air France-KLM’s smaller (though still substantial) turnovers.

Sean Doyle and Anne Rigail run individual airlines within larger groups — a role more comparable to one of Lufthansa’s airline-brand CEOs (such as SWISS’s or Austrian’s chief executive) than to Spohr himself. Comparing their pay directly to Spohr’s, as some coverage does, is comparing a subsidiary-airline CEO to a group holding-company CEO — not an apples-to-apples read.

*Note: Currency conversions above use a EUR/USD rate near 1.14 and a GBP/EUR rate implied by market pricing as of early July 2026; exact figures fluctuate daily.

Lufthansa’s Strategic Priorities Heading Into 2026

Spohr’s pay outcomes are directly tied to a handful of ongoing priorities the Supervisory Board tracks in his bonus targets:

• Fleet modernization and delivery ramp-up, including new Boeing 787s for Lufthansa Airlines
• The Allegris premium cabin rollout across long-haul aircraft
• The Lufthansa Airlines “Turnaround” cost and efficiency program, which the Group says delivered roughly €250 million in improved results in 2025 and is targeted to reach a cumulative €1.5 billion gross earnings effect in 2026
• Continued expansion of Discover Airlines and Lufthansa City Airlines, the group’s newer growth brands
• Integration of the ITA Airways stake, acquired in January 2025
• Sustainability targets, including sustainable aviation fuel adoption, which factor directly into the non-financial 20% of his annual bonus

Bottom Line

Carsten Spohr’s pay is not a mystery figure pulled from thin air — it’s disclosed annually in Lufthansa’s legally mandated Compensation Report, capped by a hard €11 million ceiling, and driven overwhelmingly (around 78–79% in the most recent disclosure) by variable, performance-linked pay rather than fixed salary. His most recently reported total stood at roughly €8.83 million, and a stronger 2025 financial year — record revenue, a 19% jump in Adjusted EBIT — makes a higher realized payout for 2025/2026 plausible once Lufthansa’s next Compensation Report is published. Measured against the right peer group — fellow airline-group CEOs Luis Gallego (IAG) and Benjamin Smith (Air France-KLM) — Spohr remains among the best-paid executives in European aviation, a position that tracks Lufthansa Group’s status as the continent’s largest airline group by revenue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Carsten Spohr’s confirmed salary? His most recently disclosed total compensation — salary, bonus, and long-term share-based incentives combined — was approximately €8.83 million, per compensation data compiled by Simply Wall St from regulatory filings. His fixed pension credit has been €990,000 annually since 2023.

Is there a legal cap on his pay? Yes. Lufthansa’s Supervisory Board has set a statutory maximum of €11.0 million per year for the Chairman of the Executive Board under Section 87a of the German Stock Corporation Act. Variable pay is automatically reduced if total compensation would otherwise exceed this ceiling.

Is Spohr the highest-paid airline-group CEO in Europe? Among group-level CEOs with comparable, disclosed figures — Luis Gallego at IAG (£4.6M) and Benjamin Smith at Air France-KLM (€5.1M) — Spohr’s most recent disclosed total is the highest, consistent with Lufthansa Group being the largest of the three by revenue.

How much of his pay is fixed salary versus bonus? In the most recent disclosure, roughly 21% of Spohr’s total compensation was fixed salary and about 79% was variable — annual bonus plus long-term, share-price-linked incentives.