When Nigerian executive pay matches London, and when it doesn't

At the very top of the Nigerian tech market, pay sometimes looks a lot like pay in London or New York. A chief of staff, a CTO or a head of product at a well-funded Lagos company can be on a dollar salary that would not look out of place abroad. Then you look one level down, or at the company next door, and the number is a fraction of that.

This gap makes Nigerian executive pay harder to benchmark than any other part of the market. Here is what drives it, and how we suggest founders think about it when they hire a leader.

The outliers are real

We recently heard about a chief of staff at a Lagos fintech who is paid in dollars, at a level well above what the role usually pays locally. It is a real number and it is not typical. Both of those things matter.

The people at that end of the market usually have something in common. They have worked abroad, or been to business school abroad, or they joined from a global firm and kept their old pay as the reference point. Some work for a Nigerian company but could do the same job remotely for a foreign one, and both sides know it.

When those salaries get shared, they travel. A founder hears that a CFO at a peer company earns a certain dollar figure and assumes that is the going rate. Usually it is the rate for that one person.

Why the gap exists

Three things push leadership pay away from the local market. The first is access. Senior people with the right experience can work for global employers from Lagos, so a Nigerian company is competing with London and Toronto, not just with the startup across the road.

The second is currency. After the naira fell sharply against the dollar from 2023 (the Central Bank of Nigeria publishes the official rates), many senior candidates started asking for some or all of their pay in dollars. A leader with a mortgage, school fees or family abroad is not willing to carry the exchange rate risk alone.

The third is scarcity. There are only so many people in Nigeria who have run a finance, engineering or product function at real scale. When a company needs one of them, it is often hiring from a pool of a few dozen names, and the price reflects that. Our Market Maps show how concentrated that experience is.

What it means for founders

Decide early whether the role is paid against the local market or the international one. They are two different hires with two different shortlists. If you need someone who has scaled a team abroad, budget for international pay. If someone who has scaled a team locally will do, the local range is fair, and you will have more candidates to choose from.

Be clear about currency from the first conversation. Saying "competitive" and then offering naira to someone expecting dollars wastes both sides' time. If you can pay part of the package in dollars, say so up front, along with how and when it is paid.

Use the whole package. Equity, scope, title and who the person reports to all count, especially for leaders who are joining to build something. A Head of Engineering who will become CTO in eighteen months may accept less cash now. Spell that path out in writing.

And expect wider ranges for leadership roles than for individual contributors. Two strong senior engineers usually sit fairly close together on pay. Two strong CFO candidates can be far apart, because the experience behind them is so different.

How we benchmark leadership pay

There is no reliable public dataset for Nigerian executive pay. Sites like Levels.fyi are useful for global tech companies but have very few Nigerian leadership entries. So we start from ranges we have seen in live searches over the past year, and check them against whatever public data exists for the role.

We also ask the question most surveys skip: is this person being paid against the local market or the international one? Separating those two groups is most of the work. Our article on why Nigeria tech salary data is so hard to find explains the rest of the problem, and Salary Data is where we are putting the numbers as they come in.

If you are hiring a leader and want help setting a range before you start talking to candidates, see how we run a search.