The heads of two companies headquartered in New Jersey are among the 50 highest paid chief executive officers, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive pay research firm.

David Cote, the CEO of Morristown-based Honeywell International made $26 million in 2013, a 63 percent hike over his compensation from the previous year. That landed him at No. 14 on the list. Honeywell is a Fortune 100 company that manufactures hundreds of products ranging from aircraft engines to barcode scanners.

Summitt-based Celgene paid CEO Robert J. Hugin $21 million, up 99 percent from 2012. Celgene, a biotehcnology company, develops treatments for cancer and other severe conditions. Hugin, a 1976 Princeton University graduate, has been the CEO at Celgene since 2010.

Anthony Petrello of Nabors Industries, an oilfield services corporation, was the country’s highest paid CEO in 2013. Petrello made $68.2 million, 246 percent more than he received a year earlier. The company is based in Hamilton, Bermuda but operates out of Houston.

The median pay package for a CEO rose above eight figures for the first time last year. The head of a typical large public company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study.

Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch. A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker’s salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.

The highest paid female CEO was Carol Meyrowitz of discount retail giant TJX, owner of TJ Maxx and Marshall’s.

Over the last several years, companies’ boards of directors have tweaked executive compensation to answer critics’ calls for CEO pay to be more attuned to performance. They’ve cut back on stock options and cash bonuses, which were criticized for rewarding executives even when a company did poorly. Boards of directors have placed more emphasis on paying CEOs in stock instead of cash and stock options.

The change became a boon for CEOs last year because of a surge in stocks that drove the Standard & Poor’s 500 index up 30 percent. The stock component of pay packages rose 17 percent to $4.5 million.

A list of the 10 highest-paid CEOs:

1.Anthony Petrello, Nabors Industries, $68.2 million, up 246 percent

2.Leslie Moonves, CBS, $65.6 million, up 9 percent

3.Richard Adkerson, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, $55.3 million, up 294 percent

4.Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisor, $39 million, up 510 percent

5.Philippe Dauman, Viacom, $37.2 million, up 11 percent

6.Leonard Schleifer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, $36.3 million, up 21 percent

7.Robert Iger, Walt Disney, $34.3 million, up 46 percent

8.David Zaslav, Discovery Communications, $33.3 million, down 33 percent

9.Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner, $32.5 million, up 27 percent

10.Brian Roberts, Comcast, $31.4 million, up 8 percent

The Associated Press contributed to this report.