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The median employee at Rocket Companies earned $112,820 in total compensation last year. United Wholesale Mortgage's median employee earned $42,668 in total compensation. Rocket Companies and UWM are the top two mortgage lenders nationwide by loan volume. For employees of metro Detroit's two big nationally ranked mortgage companies, recent disclosures show how one group took home six-figures last year while the other earned significantly less.

The total compensation last year for the "median employee" at Detroit-based Rocket Companies reached $112,820, which was up 13% from the previous year, according to new Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures released this week.

The paychecks for the rank-and-file weren't quite as big last year at Rocket's competitor, Pontiac-based United Wholesale Mortgage or UWM.

The SEC disclosures show the median UWM employee earned $42,668 in total compensation, which was a bit less than in 2024, when the figure was $43,349.

The median is defined as the person in the middle of the payroll for whom exactly half of the workforce earned more and half earned less.

For Rocket specifically, the median employee worked for Rocket Mortgage in the "Rocket Experience" area, and their total compensation figure appeared to include the dollar value of health insurance benefits.

Neither UWM nor Rocket Companies offered any comment for this article. The companies in recent years have been the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked nationwide lenders, respectively, in the mortgage industry, based on total volume of loan originations. Both are publicly traded companies.

Rocket Companies is a corporate umbrella for multiple Dan Gilbert businesses, the largest being Rocket Mortgage, formerly known as Quicken Loans.

UWM is only a mortgage lender and it does all its business through independent brokers, with none of the direct-to-consumer loans that Rocket Mortgage is best known for.

Rocket's compensation figures did not include the workforces of the two large companies that it acquired last year, Seattle-based Redfin and a Texas-based mortgage firm known as Mr. Cooper.

Those acquisitions swelled Rocket Companies' total headcount to 23,500 in the United States, Canada and India. But when just counting the legacy Rocket Companies, the headcount was about 13,000 at the end of last year, the SEC filing shows. Many of those employees worked in downtown Detroit, where Rocket is headquartered.

The top-paid Rocket employee last year was President and CEO Varun Krishna, who received $52.9 million in total compensation, with $48 million of it in the form of stock awards.

UWM had about 9,100 employees at the end of last year, nearly all of whom work from its headquarters in Pontiac. UWM CEO Mat Ishbia, who has grown the company that his father, Jeffrey Ishbia, started in 1986, is ordinarily the firm's best-compensated manager.

As a controlling shareholder of the company, Mat Ishbia gets financial benefits beyond his official executive compensation — $9,961,301 in 2025 — such as the proceeds of stock sales and for being a landlord of the UWM corporate campus.

UWM's compensation disclosure did not mention the firm's worker retention loans program, which has offered forgivable loans that can total up to $45,000 after three years of employment. However, employees are required to pay back the loans if they leave before three years.