For months, we’ve been posting information here about how much St. Louis companies pay their chief executives. Now, with the spring disclosure season nearly over, we thought it was time to tally up the numbers. Today’s column mentions some findings, such as the fact that total pay declined in 2008 for only 6 of 17 large-company CEOs in our database.

Here are a few more fun facts:

• The biggest pay package was the $15.6 million pulled down by Hugh Grant of Monsanto. (Unless otherwise specified, figures for total pay used here are simply based on the tally-sheet number reported to the SEC.)
• Biggest percentage increase, +114%, went to Steven Leer of Arch Coal.
• Smallest base salary was the $200,000 earned by Ron Kruszewski at Stifel Financial. It was just 5 percent of his $3.9 million package.
• Grant also had the biggest base salary, $1.29 million.
• If you use an alternative measure for total pay — counting new stock and options received during 2008 instead of the accounting-based figure required by the SEC — George Paz of Express Scripts takes the lead. His $7.5 million in stock grants and $2.6 million in options give him a slight lead over Grant, $13.8 million to $13.1 million. (Much Paz’s stock, however, is in an incentive plan and won’t be earned unless the company meets certain targets. Also, the values are as of February 2008, and Express Scripts’ share price has fallen since then.)
• On average, salaries increased 4 percent and bonuses (or annual incentive payments) rose 7 percent.
• Overall, salary and bonus made up 36 percent of local CEOs’ pay. Stock grants were 34 percent and options were 22 percent, with pensions, benefits and perquisites accounting for the rest.

Finally, listed below are the 17 CEOs I included in the database. I left out a few other sizeable companies because of CEO transitions or other special circumstances, and I didn’t include many of the smaller St. Louis companies. Clicking the executive pay tag on this page will take you to all of my posts on individual companies.