Sergio Ermotti, 51, who took over Zurich-based UBS after a trading scandal prompted Oswald Gruebel to step down, received 6.35 million euros. That was 19 times the average pay set aside for investment-banking employees, up from 8 in 2010.

The average ratio among the seven lenders was 37 times, down from 38 a year earlier.

Dimon's Payout

"If an organization or an industry sector doesn't perform well, executive pay is going to suffer most, and we're starting to see the rubber hit the road on that," said Frank Glassner, a San Francisco-based partner at executive-pay consulting firm Meridian Compensation Partners LLC. "Both risks and rewards are greater in the C-suite than it's ever going to be among the workforce."

Dimon bucked the pay trend. His 2011 compensation, the same as the previous year, was 50 percent higher than that of any other CEO of a global investment bank. He helped steer JPMorgan through the financial crisis without posting a quarterly loss while the firm acquired Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc. in 2008. The bank has since grown to be the largest lender in the U.S. by assets and the top global firm in investment banking and trading revenue.

"JPMorgan has outperformed its peers, and its executive pay reflected that," Glassner said. "I don't think there's a JPMorgan shareholder out there who would be complaining about Jamie Dimon's pay."

'Comp Arms Race'

Jes Staley, 55, CEO of JPMorgan's investment bank, said at the firm's investor day in February that the board and management team decided to pay individual employees a comparable amount to what other firms paid, rather than a similar percentage of revenue. That led to a drop in compensation costs for 2011 even as the division's revenue climbed. The average pay at the firm's investment bank last year was $341,552.

"We delivered the lowest comp-to-revenue ratio on the Street for the benefit of you, our shareholders," Staley said. "It avoided a comp arms race. If we had paid a compensation-to- revenue ratio on average to the rest of the industry, we would have paid our traders, our bankers, our sales people significantly higher than the rest of the industry, and we'd be right back into the race we saw over the last 15 years."

Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan in New York, declined to comment.

Citigroup, BofA

The average compensation figures don't represent individual workers' actual pay and are derived by dividing the compensation pool by the number of employees. Banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs said total compensation costs were higher than actual pay because of deferred payments awarded in previous years and recognized in 2011. The pay figures for CEOs include what they were granted for performance in that year and don't include gains from previously awarded stock or options.