National Executive Compensation Report, 2026

Annual compensation reports generally follow one of two approaches. The conventional method polls hundreds of employers about their planned pay levels, averages the figures, and labels the result a benchmark. The majority of published reports rely on this technique. In our experience, such surveys have limited practical value. Respondents describing their intentions in a questionnaire behave quite differently from decision-makers committing to a binding offer letter.

Our alternative approach — and the one underpinning this analysis — examines exclusively those offers that were formally presented, accepted, and countersigned. This report draws on 425 such offers from our finalized senior US engagements between January 2025 and early April 2026. Every figure presented here originates from an authentic, executed offer letter for an actual individual who has since assumed the position.

The headline: a bifurcating market

If there is a single conclusion to draw from this analysis, it is this: the senior US pay landscape in 2026 is neither stagnant, expanding, nor shrinking. It is splitting apart. The uppermost tier — C-suite, Board-adjacent, and roles equivalent to named executive officers — experienced total compensation growth of 6.6% year-over-year. The middle tier — VPs and Senior Directors — remained nearly unchanged at 1.9%. The lower end of our sample — Director-level individual contributors and managers — actually contracted 0.6% on a comparable basis after controlling for sector composition.

That gap — more than seven percentage points separating the top and bottom of the senior talent market within a single year — represents the widest divergence we have documented since we began tracking internal data in 2022. To illustrate what those figures look like in practical terms:

This divergence is the defining structural narrative of 2025 and 2026 to date, and its ramifications are significant. The assumption many candidates hold — that the compensation market shifts uniformly, with a rising tide elevating all boats — no longer reflects reality. Whether your seniority level commands higher or lower pay this cycle hinges largely on which side of the divide you occupy.

What explains the accelerating premium at the apex? Three mutually reinforcing dynamics. First, acute scarcity at the summit. The universe of leaders who have overseen a Fortune 1000 finance operation, directed a 500-person engineering organization, or steered a Phase 3 clinical program typically numbers fewer than fifty for any given search. When demand intensifies — as it has in finance and AI — that limited pool is bid against itself. Second, heightened board-level scrutiny. Public-company boards in 2025 explicitly sanctioned larger CEO and CFO packages in response to shareholder insistence on retention. We observed multiple offers in our dataset where the Board rationalized the package by citing a peer-group benchmark we had prepared for them. Third, the growing influence of carried interest and equity at leading private firms, which we explore at length in section 9.

The middle and lower tiers of the senior market are absent all three of these catalysts. Director-level talent remains abundant and is rarely the subject of competitive bidding in most searches. No shareholder constituency demands the retention of a particular Director. And equity grants at that tier are generally too modest to carry meaningful weight in negotiations. The outcome: inflation-adjusted wages in this segment have been essentially stagnant for three consecutive years.

Finance & capital markets

Our finance practice constituted the largest individual category in 2025: 101 placements, with 39 concentrated in the New York metropolitan area and 25 distributed across Texas (Austin, Dallas, and Houston). The architecture of finance compensation in 2026 remains the most formulaic of any sector we track — virtually every senior offer follows a variation of base + target bonus + equity or carried interest — yet the proportional weightings and absolute dollar amounts have shifted considerably.

For Chief Financial Officer positions at organizations in the $515M to $5.2B revenue bracket, headquartered in or principally operating from New York, our 2025 dataset reveals the following:

The 75th-percentile equity figure of $1.13M deserves particular attention. Three years prior, this number would have hovered around $410K for an equivalent role. The movement reflects a fundamental transformation in how PE-backed and pre-IPO organizations compensate senior finance leadership: equity-at-grant has become the dominant component of the package rather than a supplementary incentive layered onto cash. This represents both an opportunity (the upside is tangible if the company achieves a favorable exit) and a liability (the remaining cash elements are frequently leaner than a comparable public-company offer).

For the deeper breakdown on CFO comp in New York — including the public-vs-PE-vs-pre-IPO split, the under-discussed components of an offer letter, and where to push during negotiation — we’ve written a separate piece dedicated to NYC CFO comp.

Beneath the CFO tier, the picture is less favorable. Median base for a Controller at a $1B+ organization in New York remained at $252K in 2025, virtually static from 2023 in nominal terms (and meaningfully diminished in real terms after accounting for inflation). VP Finance, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, Director of Tax — all positions in the $206K–$330K base range — have experienced compensation stagnation. We have had numerous conversations with candidates at this level who express surprise upon receiving an external offer, only to discover it essentially mirrors their existing package with a one-time sign-on bonus to close the gap. The compression is unmistakable.

The single most underpriced senior finance role in 2026, in our view, is the strong VP of Finance at a sub-$500M private company. The base is light. The equity at most companies is too thin to matter. And the work is closer to a CFO’s job than the title suggests. If you have the option, push hard for the title — the compensation will follow eventually. — Diana Thornton, Talent Partner · Finance Practice

The other notable sub-trend in finance: Texas has fundamentally redrawn the finance hiring landscape. Of our 25 Texas finance placements in 2025, 19 were in Dallas-Fort Worth at firms that either transferred their headquarters to Texas or sustained substantial Texas operations. Compensation in DFW now falls within 10–15% of NYC for comparable CFO roles — and after adjusting for state taxes, frequently yields higher net-of-tax income. We dig into the Texas finance migration in detail in a separate piece.

Technology & engineering

Where finance represents the most predictable sector in our dataset, technology stands as the most volatile. The Bay Area technology compensation market in 2026 has fractured more dramatically than any other sector we monitor, and the fracture is no longer incremental. Identical job title, identical engineering team scope, identical industry vertical — yet we have observed total compensation spanning from $495K to upward of $2.06 million for the same role profile, determined entirely by which employer is extending the offer.

This is, frankly, a remarkable chart. Within the same timeframe, the same talent pool, performing fundamentally the same work, compensation at one category of employer surged 62% while at another it contracted 8%. No single economic framework accounts for both trajectories neatly. What exists instead is a dual narrative: capital is pouring into AI infrastructure and applied AI at a pace unmatched in mature SaaS, and the compensation packages mirror that disparity. The market for the same individual is genuinely cleaving in two.

The outsized AI premium distills to two specific dynamics. The first is authentic talent scarcity. The cohort of engineering leaders who have credibly directed a large-scale ML infrastructure team is narrow — by our estimate, fewer than eight hundred twenty individuals across the entire United States, and fewer than three hundred ten of those have overseen engineering organizations exceeding fifty people. When a foundation-model company or major AI-infrastructure firm initiates a VPE search, they are typically vying for a subset of those three hundred ten candidates against three to five other organizations conducting parallel searches.

The second is the equity-grant escalation that the AI-native segment is demonstrating. A typical VPE at a Series C AI company today receives an initial equity grant of 0.3–0.7% of fully diluted shares, valued at the most recent funding round. With those companies frequently carrying primary valuations of $5.2–$51.5 billion, the face value of even a 0.3% grant ranges from $15.5–$154 million. The 409A discount and vesting risk ensure the realized figure will be a fraction of this, but the headline number is what secures the candidate.

The corresponding contraction at public, post-IPO software companies reflects the same dynamic operating in reverse. Public-company stock-compensation packages were calibrated in 2022–2023, when share prices were elevated. As valuations retreated and refresh grants in 2024–2025 were sized against then-prevailing prices, the dollar value of new awards diminished. A VPE who joined a public SaaS company in mid-2022 has, on average, watched the dollar value of their unvested equity erode 20–36% over three years — and the subsequent grants have not fully bridged the shortfall.

Beyond the VPE tier, we observe considerable variance across other senior engineering positions. Director of Engineering at public tech firms in our 2025 dataset registered median total comp of $427K (Bay Area), up a mere $5K from 2024. Senior Engineering Manager registered median total comp of $335K, essentially unchanged. The premium for AI specialization, however, extends throughout the hierarchy — we placed multiple Senior Engineering Managers at AI-native companies with total comp at or above $670K.

The full picture of how Bay Area VPE comp has fractured is the subject of a separate piece focused entirely on VP Engineering compensation in San Francisco, including how to think about equity vesting, refresh policies, and the long-term realized-vs-grant gap.

Healthcare & life sciences

Our healthcare and life sciences practice produced the smallest dataset in 2025 — 39 placements — but exhibited the most internally coherent trend: compensation is climbing at companies with favorable clinical data and declining at companies lacking it.

Chief Medical Officer positions at clinical-stage biotech firms with encouraging Phase 2 or Phase 3 readouts in 2024 saw median total comp expand 11.5% year-over-year. The identical role at companies with stalled or unsuccessful trials — a not-infrequent outcome in our sample — saw compensation contract. In several negotiations we conducted, the structure was heavily tilted toward performance-vesting equity linked to specific clinical milestones. The headline figure on the offer letter appeared competitive; the actual realized compensation hinged substantially on whether the subsequent trial delivered positive results.

The single most active sub-segment of our 2025 life-sciences practice was metabolic disease and weight-management therapeutics. The continued commercial triumph of GLP-1 receptor agonists has redirected capital allocation across biotech, and the talent market has responded accordingly. We placed twelve senior leaders in this space alone — CMOs, VPs of Clinical Development, Heads of Commercial — with median base salaries 19% above comparable roles in cardiovascular or oncology. Sign-on bonuses in this sub-segment averaged $258K, a sharp increase from $129K in our 2023 placements.

Commercial leadership in life sciences — VP and CCO roles at companies launching or scaling a commercial product — showed median total comp of $742K in 2025, up 4.9% year-over-year. The structure heavily favors variable comp tied to revenue milestones, particularly at companies whose first products are in their first or second year of commercial sales.

Medical-device commercial leadership tracks roughly with biotech commercial in our data, but with one notable distinction: sign-on bonuses are larger and more often guaranteed. Medical-device companies competing for senior commercial talent — particularly companies running competitive launches against established players — have been more willing to offer cash sign-on as a way to bridge from a candidate’s current package to a future-state equity component that won’t fully vest for years.

Sales, marketing & revenue

The revenue side of the organization presents a cleaner, more focused narrative than the engineering side: variable compensation is increasing, base salary is static. Across 90 sales and revenue placements in our 2025 dataset, median base salaries advanced just 2.2%, while median on-target variable compensation climbed 14.7%. Companies are channeling a greater share of the senior revenue-team package into pay-for-performance structures, and they are prepared to fund more generous plans when results materialize.

For Chief Revenue Officer roles at $50M–$200M ARR SaaS companies in 2025:

The structural detail worth highlighting is the emergence of substantial accelerator structures. The multiplier on commission rates beyond plan attainment was historically capped near 1.5× in most senior sales-leader packages. In 2025, we encountered five offers featuring accelerators of 2.5× or greater for above-quota performance. The arithmetic produces a compelling incentive: a CRO who exceeds a $5.15M new-business target by 30% could capture $412K+ in incremental commission within a single year. This mechanism was virtually nonexistent three years ago and has now become a legitimate negotiating instrument.

Marketing leadership tells a distinct story from sales. Median Chief Marketing Officer compensation in our 2025 dataset stood at $561K total, essentially level year-over-year. Sub-segments diverged, however. CMOs at AI-native and FinTech companies exhibited total comp 23% above the median; CMOs at traditional consumer-goods and retail companies fell 14% below. The premium for proximity to high-growth sectors permeates marketing just as it does engineering.

One sub-segment in 2025 that caught even us off guard: VP of Brand and Creative roles. Historically undercompensated relative to growth and demand-generation marketing counterparts, brand leadership saw median total comp rise 11.7% in 2025 as companies confronted the reality that performance marketing alone was not generating efficient growth. The pendulum, at least within our placements, is swinging back toward investment in brand — and the compensation data confirms it.

Legal & general counsel

The legal practice is more compact (30 placements in 2025) but carries outsized influence — nearly all retained engagements at the General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, or M&A Partner level. The market here is stable, with compensation closely mirroring inflation — median total comp growth of 3.5% across our 2025 legal placements.

The most compelling structural development is the rise of dedicated AI Counsel roles as a distinct senior position. We placed seven AI-specific in-house counsel roles in 2025, with company types spanning from Series C startups to a Fortune 500 incumbent. Median base for those roles was $320K, with equity packages averaging $190K. Both figures sit meaningfully above the equivalent generalist Senior Counsel role at the same organizations. The premium for AI-regulatory specialization is now tangible, substantial, and almost certainly expanding as state and federal AI regulation advances.

General Counsel roles at $1B+ public companies remained the pinnacle of the legal pay structure: median total comp of $1.49M, with equity grants constituting more than half of the package. Sign-on bonuses at this level grew meaningfully — median $258K in 2025, up from $155K in 2023 — as companies competed for the relatively narrow pool of GCs willing to transition from comparable seats.

Geography & cost-of-living math

Beyond sector, the geographic distribution of US senior compensation has shifted materially. The pay differential between SF/NYC and secondary markets has not collapsed in the manner some commentators predicted in 2020–2021, but the cost-of-living differential has widened, and the after-tax arithmetic is now meaningfully altered.

Our 2025 dataset by office, for VP-level total compensation across all sectors:

What this table omits is what ultimately determines actual disposable income: housing costs, state and local tax burdens, and household-level decisions around education and quality of life. A VP earning $479K in Austin and paying zero state income tax frequently nets out roughly equivalent to a VP earning $630K in NYC after taxes and housing differentials — with the remaining quality-of-life delta being a matter of individual preference. For dual-income households, the gap widens further; the tax-free Texas, Washington, or Florida income applies to both spouses’ earnings.

This is not a theoretical exercise. Of the 425 placements in our dataset, 48 involved an interstate relocation. Of those 48, 33 moved from a higher-cost market to a lower-cost market (NYC→Miami, SF→Austin, Boston→Atlanta, etc.). The migration of senior US talent toward lower-tax states is a documented, accelerating trend, and the compensation differentials visible in the table above are integral to the story.

For the specific market dynamics in Texas — which has absorbed more senior US talent than any other state outside California — see our piece on why Austin and Dallas are outpacing the coasts. For the parallel story in Florida — the rise of Miami as a serious finance hub — see our piece on Miami’s rise as a US finance center.

The structural shift in equity

The single most consequential structural change in 2025 senior US compensation was not the magnitude of pay — it was the architecture of equity. Three trends, each of which fundamentally alters the calculus of accepting one offer over another.

First, refresh grants are getting smaller but more frequent. The conventional structure featured a substantial initial grant with a 4-year cliff vest, followed by an annual refresh of roughly 25–40% of the initial grant value. Many late-stage tech companies are now transitioning to smaller, more frequent refreshes — semi-annual or even quarterly — producing two effects. It dampens year-over-year volatility in realized comp, which the companies regard as advantageous. And it strengthens the retention mechanism, since you are perpetually within a relatively recent vesting window. Departing becomes costlier.

Second, performance-vesting equity (PSUs) is back in fashion. Roughly 19% of senior offers we negotiated in 2025 incorporated some form of performance-vesting equity. In 2022, that proportion was below 5%. This is especially prevalent at PE-backed companies and at public tech firms with newer CEOs seeking to align senior-team compensation with operational metrics rather than stock-price performance alone. The candidate perspective on this trade has been mixed — PSUs that vest fully are typically more valuable than equivalent time-vesting grants, but the realization rate is lower, and the metrics governing vesting sometimes fall outside the candidate’s direct influence.

Third, sign-on grants have grown materially. The one-time sign-on grant — typically cash or RSUs vesting on a 12-month cliff — has risen from a median of $77K in 2023 to $149K in 2025 for our VP-level placements. The catalyst: companies are deploying sign-on grants to bridge the gap between target base and what candidates’ current employers will counter with. The sign-on remains the most flexible individual component of an offer, and when the remainder of the package is band-constrained, it is where the negotiation concentrates.

If you retain only one piece of actionable guidance from this report, let it be this: in 2026, the structure of an equity package carries more weight than the headline grant figure. The same $1.03M of equity, vesting over 3 years versus 6, with versus without performance triggers, with versus without acceleration on change of control, can produce an expected-value difference of $310K to $515K. Most candidates — including those in our dataset who later expressed regret about not negotiating more aggressively — fixate on the headline. The structure is where the real value resides.

For deeper coverage of how to think about equity packages specifically — including the right questions to ask in final-round negotiations — see our piece on VP Engineering compensation in San Francisco, where the equity dynamic is the most extreme.

What this means if you’re looking

Three practical implications if you’re a senior US professional thinking about your next move.

Sector outweighs title. A VP Engineering at an AI-native company and a VP Engineering at a post-IPO public software company are performing substantially the same work for vastly different compensation. Select your sector before you select your role. The same principle holds in finance (PE-backed vs. public), healthcare (positive-data vs. stalled-trial biotech), and to a lesser extent in sales (high-growth vs. mature). The "what type of company" question now exerts a greater compensation impact than the "what title" question.

Geography is a genuine lever. The pay gap between SF/NYC and Austin/Miami has not closed, but the cost-of-living differential has widened. Net-of-tax, net-of-housing, the secondary markets frequently deliver superior disposable-income outcomes — particularly for dual-income households and for executives who would otherwise occupy the highest state-tax brackets. Whether this trade suits you depends substantially on personal factors (family, schools, professional network depth), but the financial calculus has tilted further toward relocation than it stood three years ago.

Negotiate structure, not merely numbers. The divergence in senior US compensation means the gap between a solid package and an exceptional one increasingly depends on how the equity is structured, what the severance triggers are, whether refreshes are guaranteed, and how acceleration operates on change of control. Most candidates — in our experience — devote 80% of their negotiation effort to base salary, where the flexibility is narrowest. The leverage lies elsewhere.

If you would like a confidential discussion about how your current compensation stacks up against our 2025–2026 dataset, or about how to evaluate a specific offer you are weighing, reach out to us. We conduct this type of benchmarking on a weekly basis for senior professionals who are not actively searching but want an informed perspective.

What this means if you’re hiring

The flip side of the bifurcation matters if you’re the one writing the offer. Three observations from our 2025 client-side data:

Compensation benchmarks anchored to title alone are no longer dependable. The 75th-percentile VPE salary at a Series C AI company bears almost no resemblance to the 75th-percentile VPE salary at a public B2B software company. If your compensation committee relies on a generic "tech VP" benchmark, you are either materially overpaying or underpaying. The most effective clients we partner with run dual benchmarks: one against direct industry peers (e.g., other Series C AI infrastructure firms), and one against the specific competitive set the candidate is evaluating.

The window between offer and signature has compressed. Median time from offer extension to countersignature in our 2025 finance and tech placements was 8 days, down from 13 days in 2023. Candidates are deciding faster because they hold more competing offers; the era of leaving a senior offer on the table for two weeks while the candidate deliberates is largely over. If your internal approval process cannot operate at this tempo, you are effectively excluding yourself from senior searches.

Sign-on bonuses are increasingly the decisive closing mechanism. Candidates with unvested equity at their current employer face a "make-whole" calculation when contemplating a move. The most effective method for bridging that gap, in our 2025 negotiations, was a sign-on grant tailored to the candidate’s specific unvested equity timeline. Generic sign-on amounts prove less effective; individually modeled sign-on amounts close deals. If your offer-package framework does not permit custom sign-on calibration, you are forfeiting opportunities.

Methodology & caveats

This report is constructed from 425 verified, signed-and-accepted offer letters from senior US placements completed by Winslow Search in calendar year 2025 plus partial 2026 data through April 7. We exclude offers that were extended but rejected, withdrawn, or never finalized.

All compensation figures are stated gross (pre-tax), in nominal US dollars. Equity is valued at grant using the company’s most recent 409A valuation for private companies and the trailing 30-day average closing price for public companies. Target bonuses are reported at target, not actual payout (which remains unknown for 2025 in most instances). Sign-on bonuses are reported as full one-time amounts, not annualized.

We exclude data on candidates we did not place, candidates currently in active process, and candidates we sourced for searches that concluded without a hire. Our sample is therefore skewed toward successful matches — offers that were simultaneously appealing to candidates and acceptable to clients. That bias merits acknowledgment, as it likely understates how aggressive certain hypothetical offers might be in a different segment of the market.

Year-over-year comparisons control for company stage and sector composition where feasible. Where the underlying mix has shifted substantially (e.g., AI-native companies constituted a much smaller share of our 2022 dataset), we have noted this in the relevant section.

This report does not constitute legal, financial, or compensation advice. Historical performance and prior compensation ranges are not predictive of future outcomes for any individual offer or search. Specific compensation outcomes will vary based on candidate qualifications, company budget, role specifics, and market conditions at the time of negotiation. For questions about methodology or to request the underlying anonymized dataset for academic or research use, contact our research team at research@winslowsearch.com.

This annual report is authored by Evelyn Hargrove (Managing Partner) with significant contributions from Diana Thornton on the finance practice, Sonia Gupta on technology, Raymond Cooke on healthcare and life sciences, Philip Andersen on regional dynamics, and the Winslow Search research team on data compilation and analysis.