National Executive Compensation Report, 2026
An in-depth examination of how executive pay has evolved across the nine industries we serve — spanning finance through healthcare — drawing on 2,400 verified placements as our data source.
Compensation benchmarks, market analyses, and career-strategy articles from our partners and senior consultants — grounded in verified placement data, not opinion surveys. 38 reports covering 2021 through 2026.
Detailed compensation data for Chief Financial Officers across New York's public, PE-backed, and pre-IPO sectors — including the equity structures that most candidates overlook.
VPE compensation in the Bay Area has split into two distinct tiers. Established tech companies offer one range; AI-native startups offer another. The data behind the divergence, and what it signals.
Texas created more senior-level technology and finance positions in 2025 than any US state besides California. A detailed look at the talent migration, compensation levels, and underlying drivers.
Nearly three out of four professionals who accept a counter-offer depart within 18 months regardless. The statistics, the behavioral patterns behind them, and the uncommon scenarios where staying actually works.
Impersonation scams targeting job seekers have tripled over the past 18 months. Twelve warning signs that distinguish a legitimate recruiter from someone after your data, money, or identity.
A practical guide to exploring new opportunities while keeping your current employer unaware — without relying on premium LinkedIn features that rarely deliver on their promise.
Citadel, Ken Griffin, Carl Icahn, Microsoft, Amazon, Apollo — Miami’s Brickell now hosts a financial cluster that would have been unthinkable in 2019. What that means for senior talent.
Thirty articles from 2021 through 2025 — compensation guides, market analyses, and career-strategy reports from the same team.
The FTC's attempted ban on non-compete agreements drew immediate legal challenges. By late 2025, the landscape for senior professionals with non-compete clauses in their employment agreements was genuinely different from 2023 — but not in the ways most people assumed.
By 2025, Denver-Boulder had quietly become the sixth-largest technology employment market in the United States. It's still small by SF or NYC standards. But the trajectory puts it in a different category from the "second tier" markets of a few years ago.
Atlanta has been a Fortune 500 city for decades — home to Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot, and others. In 2025, it is also quietly becoming a meaningful senior technology and financial services market. Here's what changed.
The 2025 Boston life sciences market is defined by a single dynamic: the GLP-1 wave has raised the compensation floor for metabolic disease leadership while other sub-sectors remain largely flat. Here are the verified figures.
Amazon and Microsoft together represent the largest concentration of senior technology employment in any US city outside San Francisco. The 2022-2024 layoff cycle hit Seattle hard. The 2025 recovery is genuine but unevenly distributed.
The CFO-to-CEO transition is the most common route from finance leadership to the top role. It's also one of the hardest pivots in senior US corporate careers, and it carries a compensation structure most CFOs don't anticipate.
Board compensation is real, the time commitment is real, and the legal exposure is realer than most candidates realize until they're in it. Here's the framework for evaluating a board seat invitation.
Equity refresh grants are the most overlooked element of senior US compensation. A VP who negotiates a refresh policy at the time of signing can realize 50% to 100% more in equity over a four-year tenure than one who accepts the initial offer as-is.
Chicago spent 2022 and 2023 watching talent migrate to Miami and Dallas. Chicago's finance recovery story in 2024 is less dramatic than the migration stories but arguably more durable — built on a different foundation.
The 525-basis-point rate hike cycle of 2022-2023 reshaped how companies approached headcount decisions. At the senior level, the effects were precise and quantifiable — and their reverberations continued well into 2024.
Philadelphia doesn't get the press of Miami or Dallas. It's also not trying to. The 2024 Philadelphia finance scene is growing steadily in specific sectors — insurance, asset management, and the distinctive university-endowment ecosystem — and it's worth understanding.
The wave of "fractional C-suite" roles that emerged in 2022-2024 promised senior professionals flexibility and variety. For some, it delivered. For many others, it was a lower-paying temporary arrangement that delayed a better move. The data tells the story.
There is a specific stall point in US corporate careers that we see in our data more than any other: Director. Not individual contributors, not middle managers, not C-suite — Director. Here's what causes it and how to move through it.
In 2023, "AI" appeared in 12% of all US senior executive job postings — up from 1.4% in 2021. The flood of new AI-adjacent titles is changing comp benchmarks, career ladders, and what companies mean when they say "senior."
Media. Retail. Traditional financial services. A significant share of senior US professionals work in industries where total headcount is structurally shrinking. The strategy for navigating that reality differs markedly from conventional career-transition guidance.
By 2023, salary disclosure laws covered roughly 20% of the US workforce. Senior professionals who know how to read and use posted ranges have a meaningful advantage in compensation negotiation. Most don't.
Every senior professional has been advised to "never take a step back." The data from our placements suggests this advice is often wrong — and that some of the best career moves in our sample involved a candidate taking a lower title at a substantially better company.
This piece is awkward to write, because we are the product we're describing. But it's a question we get asked directly by candidates who've been burned by bad recruiting experiences, and we think it deserves a candid answer.
The operating partner role occupies an unusual compensation structure — part advisory, part executive, with carried interest that may or may not vest. In 2023, senior PE operating partner pay ranged from $400K to well above $3M annually, with stage and fund size as the primary determinants.
In 2019, 78% of US hedge fund assets were managed from New York, Chicago, or Connecticut. By the end of 2022 that number was 68%. Ten percentage points doesn't sound dramatic. It represents hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of senior careers.
2022 recorded the highest voluntary departure rate among senior engineering leaders at major US tech companies in a decade. The exits followed a clear pattern — and understanding it explains much about where senior tech talent relocated.
Companies told us remote-capable roles wouldn't carry comp penalties. The 2022 data told a different story — remote senior professionals earned 7% less on average than comparable on-site roles at the same companies. Here's why.
Hospital system CFOs, VP Medical Affairs, COOs of large health systems — healthcare administration compensation is large, structurally different from corporate finance, and almost completely undocumented in public benchmarks. We're fixing that.
The in-house legal market in 2022 was defined by one trend: companies hiring aggressively to internalize work previously done by outside counsel, at pay scales that made the move attractive. Here's what that looked like in practice.
Bank failures are uncommon enough that most senior finance professionals have never lived through one. The SVB collapse in 2023 offered an unexpected case study in how institutional knowledge disperses — and how the senior talent market absorbs the fallout.
Conventional wisdom holds that senior careers should always move upward. Our data shows that the most valuable moves often go sideways — into a new industry, a different function, or a smaller company with a broader mandate.
Most candidates fixate on grant size. The variables that truly determine realized value — vesting schedule, refresh policy, acceleration clauses, and tax treatment — are nearly always negotiable and nearly always overlooked.
Quit rates reached 3% among US workers in late 2021. Among senior executives and VP-level professionals, the comparable figure stayed below 1%. The dynamics governing senior labor markets are fundamentally different from what the headlines suggested.
In 2015, fewer than 400 US companies employed a CRO. By 2021, more than 8,000 did. The title was created to address a structural problem — siloed sales and marketing functions — and its compensation reflects how critical that problem has become.
Kendall Square now has more biotech R&D spending per square mile than anywhere else on earth. The labor market for senior science and clinical leadership reflects that concentration — and behaves by different rules than any other senior US market.