May 10--Annual raises are no longer automatic for corporate CEOs.

And compensation committees at North Jersey's public companies have largely replaced guaranteed bonuses with performance-based incentives. Taken together, that meant less money in the pockets of many chief executives last year, reflecting the sharp drop in earnings and stock prices.

Still, more than half the men and women who led the 50 companies included in The Record's 14th annual report on CEO pay took home more than $1 million last year, including five who topped the $10 million mark.

In almost every case, the biggest chunk of their compensation came from cashing in stock options granted in previous years, according to proxy and 10K forms that public companies file annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Included are CEOs of two Paramus-based companies, Ronald Hermance of Hudson City Bancorp, who cashed in $37.5 million in options, and Steven Roth of Vornado Realty Trust, who got $26.7 million from options.

Hudson City's stock rose by 6.3 percent, and Hermance was rewarded with increases in salary and bonus. But Roth also cashed in, more than making up for a salary freeze and a token $5,700 cut in his bonus in a year in which Vornado's stock fell 31 percent.

But drops in stock prices at other companies, along with lower sales and earnings, left many CEOs with no options to cash in, tiny salary increases, and the loss of bonuses and other incentive-based payouts.

In that way, trends in North Jersey were similar to those nationally, where CEO pay raises averaged 3.5 percent in 2008. The average among companies in The Record's survey was 4.8 percent and the average CEO compensation last year was $688,303.

And more than half of the nation's top executives are not getting any increase this year, said Peter Oppermann, a worldwide partner at Mercer Inc., a New York-based human-resource consulting company.

At Parsippany-based Avis Budget Group Inc., CEO Ronald Nelson saw his salary frozen at $1 million -- one of eight CEOs who got no increase in base salary. He also did not receive a bonus, after getting $900,000 a year earlier.

The reasons were spelled out by the compensation committee, which cited revenue retention and cash flow results that did not meet "all of the performance goals contained in our incentive programs."

As a result, "our pay-for-performance discipline resulted in compensation paid ... for 2008 being well below the compensation targeted ...