It takes just 33 hours or three working days for ‘fat cat’ bosses’ pay to outstrip the average employee’s annual wage of £29,559, calculations reveal.

The High Pay Centre (HPC) and The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) revealed that top bosses earn 117 times the annual pay of the average worker.

Latest data from 2018 showed that the average FTSE 100 CEO earned £3.46m, the equivalent to £901.30 an hour, while the typical worker receives £14.37 an hour.

However, executive pay has fallen slightly from £3.9m in 2019, meaning it takes them until teatime, rather than lunchtime on the third working day of the new year to earn the median UK salary.

The HPC and CIPD said high pay will be a key issue in 2020 as this is the first year that publicly listed firms with more than 250 UK employees must disclose the ratio between CEO pay and the pay of average workers.

They added that CEOs are paid “extraordinarily highly compared to the wider workforce”, making the UK one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.

In a blog post, they wrote: “If we want to raise incomes for low and middle earners, measures that will enable them to get a fairer, more proportionate share of the spend on pay distributed by big companies will be of critical importance.”