Michael O’Leary, the charismatic and often outspoken boss of Ryanair, who is credited with turning what was a failing regional airline into Europe’s biggest low-cost carrier, could be in line for a second €100 million bonus after he agreed to delay his retirement yet again.
On Monday, Ryanair released its financial results for 2025, and with it came an update on O’Leary’s position at the Dublin-based carrier.
As chief executive of the Ryanair Group, which also owns subsidiary carriers like Buzz, Malta Air, and Lauda, alongside its namesake Ryanair brand, O’Leary had previously agreed a four-year contract extension in December 2022, which runs through to July 2028.
Under the terms of that deal, O’Leary signed up to win a bonus payment of 10 million worth of shares, worth around €100 million, if Ryanair’s share price hit and stayed at €21 for at least 28 days, or annual profit after tax exceeded €2.2 billion.
Ryanair achieved the share price target in 2025, while the profit after tax target was just reached, with the Ryanair Group just posting a profit of €2.26 billion.
Unwilling to lose O’Leary, the Ryanair board has been busy negotiating an extension on his current contract that would see him commit to stay as the group’s chief executive until April 2032.
Those negotiations haven’t yet been concluded, as Ryanair still needs to talk with its largest institutional shareholders to see whether they will back the proposal.
They’ll have to be convinced to once again offer O’Leary a bonus of 10 million shares in the airline. In a statement, the airline stressed that O’Leary would only be able to exercise these share options if “very ambitious” targets are met that would “create substantial value for all shareholders.”
While the potential bonus sounds huge, as airline chief executives go, O’Leary doesn’t earn a massive base salary.
In 2025, financial records show that O’Leary earned a fixed basic salary of just €1.2 millon. On top of that, O’Leary is eligible for a bonus not more than 50% of his base salary.
In the last reporting period, O’Leary was awarded the full €600,000 bonus, which was slightly less than full year 2024, when O’Leary earned €588,000 in bonuses.
O’Leary is only permitted to vest his 10 million share bonus in Ryanair between
April 2028 and February 2029.
Should negotiations to extend O’Leary’s contract somehow fall through, which, given his track record at Ryanair, is incredibly unlikely, he would be barred from taking on a similar role within the European Union for at least 12 months.
How strong that non-compete clause is in practice is, however, questionable.
In 2019, Peter Bellew, the former Chief Operations Officer at Ryanair, won a court battle allowing him to move to the airline’s arch-rival EasyJet after Ryanair’s lawyers sought a court order to stop the move from going ahead.
Ryanair had argued that Bellew signed a two-year non-compete agreement in his contract, but the Irish High Court ruled that the clause was too broad and, therefore, unenforceable.
