D.R. Horton CEO David Auld’s $30 million package makes him D-FW’s highest paid leader

The real estate market boomed nationwide in 2021, and so did the compensation package of David Auld, the chief executive officer of Arlington-based D.R. Horton. After years of flirting with the No. 1 spot, Auld claimed the title of highest-paid CEO in Dallas-Fort Worth, according to The Dallas Morning News’ annual analysis of executive compensation. Houston-based executive compensation firm NFP Compensation Consulting (formerly known as Longnecker & Associates) does the data crunching for The News’ ranking of pay at the 100 largest publicly traded companies. Auld received $30.6 million in total direct compensation in 2021 — a 59% raise over his 2020 pay. His pay package ranked as the 13th largest nationally, according to a separate ranking of U.S. companies by Equilar. D.R. Horton is a titan in the real estate industry and the largest U.S. homebuilder.

“The No. 1 predictor of CEO compensation is just the size of the company,” said Ryan Krause, an associate professor at Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business. In several companies, executive chairmen collected larger paychecks than the CEOs running day-to-day operations. D.R. Horton was one of those. Donald R. Horton, the company’s founder and executive chairman, had a compensation package totaling $50.6 million, driven by a bonus program that rewarded Auld, Horton and a third executive with a percentage of pre-tax profits. For Horton, that bonus amounted to $32 million. For Auld, it represented $21.4 million of his overall pay. The company’s pre-tax profit in one of the hottest housing markets in history was $5.4 billion. It was also a prosperous year for the company’s shareholders, who saw D.R. Horton’s stock price rise 62% in 2021. “We closed the most homes in a year in our company’s history, achieving 10% market share with record profits and returns,” Auld said in the company’s 2021 year-end financials call. Top executives of other traditional giants in the region also had a solid year following the uncertainty of pandemic-riddled 2020. In addition to Auld, the CEOs of Exxon Mobil, Charles Schwab, Tenet Healthcare, AT&T and Nexstar all remained among The News’ 10 highest paid executives in 2021.