Determining executive compensation is a crucial choice for every organization. Compensation is essential for attracting, retaining, and motivating an executive, and it influences the broader picture beyond the pay disparity. Moreover, executive compensation throughout the economy affects the public’s image of capitalism. Executive compensation includes a whole set of monetary and non-monetary perks offered to top-level executive directors such as CEOs, CFOs, managing directors, and other executives in a firm. Agency conflict arises from the divergence of shareholders and managers in listed companies. Agency theory is critical to examining conflicts of interest between principals and agents. It is fundamental in elucidating executive compensation disparities and formulating strategies to mitigate conflicts of interest between shareholders and management. Other theories relating to executive compensation, such as tournament theory, optimal contracting theory, entrenchment effect, and alignment effect, are also essential. In India, the importance of executive compensation rose post-economic liberalization due to the increasing profitability margin of firms, increase in competition for managerial abilities, benchmarking Indian companies with global standards, etc. One unique characteristic exclusive to India (compared to developed nations) is the prevalence of “family-owned” firms. They essentially have “owner-managers,” where business owners also serve as managers. Another uniqueness is that Indian family firms have a higher concentration of ownership, high growth opportunities, and an underdeveloped financial market. Overall, this study sheds light on over-compensation, pay disparity, family firms, and ownership concentration in Indian firms regarding executive compensation.