DEF 14A filings read by encoded rules, not analysts.

A DEF 14A is the definitive proxy statement a public company files with the SEC before its annual shareholder meeting. It discloses board nominees, the matters up for a vote, and executive compensation — including the CD&A narrative and the summary compensation table. It is the primary public source for named-officer pay data.

The Compensation Discussion and Analysis is the narrative section in which the compensation committee explains its pay decisions: the pay philosophy, the peer groups, and how salary, incentives, and equity were set. It is where target values and plan structures are described, which is why comp studies read it alongside the tables.

Executive pay appears in the CD&A narrative and in the required tables: the summary compensation table, grants of plan-based awards, outstanding equity awards, and option exercises and stock vested. Director compensation has its own table. The figures for the named executive officers sit across these sections, not in one place.

Target values are the amounts a plan is designed to pay at expected performance — base salary, target bonus, and target award values. Actual values are what was ultimately paid or realized. Benchmarking studies are built on targets; mixing actuals into a target-based study corrupts the comparison, so the two must be extracted as separate fields.

Yes. DEF 14A filings are public on EDGAR, and the fields a study needs can be read directly from the filings themselves. The hard part is not access — it is applying a study’s rules consistently across hundreds of filings, so that every extracted value is reproducible and cited to its source location.