Rising top incomes and the growing concentration of wealth have become defining features of contemporary economies. A small share of individuals captures an increasing proportion of total income —driven largely by capital income and entrepreneurial profits— fueling inequality, weakening equality of opportunity, and concentrating economic and political power. These dynamics undermine democratic accountability, as extreme incomes can be translated into disproportionate influence over policy, media, and public debate. They also have ecological consequences, as large fortunes shape investment decisions that drive resource-intensive and environmentally harmful activities. Maximum income schemes respond to these challenges by establishing institutional limits on very high incomes, through combinations of maximum income and/or maximum wage instruments: (i) maximum income policies that cap total individual income —typically implemented through highly progressive taxation approaching 100% above a defined threshold— and (ii) maximum wage policies that limit labour income, for instance through pay ratios within organisations or sectoral wage ceilings. To be effective, such schemes must define income comprehensively to include not only realised income but also unrealised capital gains and retained or unrealised entrepreneurial profits, which constitute a large and growing share of economic income at the top of the distribution.
While comprehensive national schemes remain rare, precedents exist. High top marginal tax rates in the United States and other countries historically acted as de facto income caps , while more recent examples include executive pay limits in the public sector (e.g. France, the Netherlands) and wage ratio rules in organisations such as the Mondragon cooperative group in Spain. These policies are significant because they directly constrain excessive income accumulation, reduce inequality at the top of the distribution, and help rebalance economic and political power. They can also generate public revenues to finance universal services and social protection, while reshaping norms around remuneration and curbing status-driven excess. Moreover, empirical research show that employees of large companies would cap the pay of their bosses at 5.6 times the average pay and around 10 to 20 times the highest pay in a country in relation to the minimum wage. Within a broader post-growth policy framework, maximum income schemes contribute to eradicating poverty by expanding fiscal space, as well as to strengthening redistribution, and to reducing the concentration of resources that drives both social inequality and ecological pressure. As part of a wider set of policies, including wealth and inheritance taxation, labour reforms, and universal services, they enable governments to meet human needs more directly, without relying on continuous economic growth.
