The 2026 US Executive Compensation Report

There are two ways to write an annual compensation report. The first is to survey hundreds of people about what they intend to pay, average the responses, and call it a benchmark. Most published comp reports work this way. We’ve never found them particularly useful. People asked what they will pay say one thing; people putting their names on an offer letter behave differently.

The second way — the way we do it — is to look only at offers that were extended, accepted, and counter-signed. This piece is built on 412 such offers from our completed senior US placements between January 2025 and the first week of April 2026. Every number you’re about to read is from a real signed offer letter for a real human being who is now doing the job.

The headline: a bifurcating market

If you take only one thing from this report, take this: the senior US compensation market in 2026 is not flat, growing, or contracting. It is bifurcating. The very top of the market — C-suite, Board-adjacent, and the equivalent of "named executive officer" roles — saw total compensation grow 6.4% year-over-year. The middle of the market — VPs and Senior Directors — was nearly flat at 1.8%. The bottom of our dataset — Director-level individual contributors and managers — actually declined 0.6% on a like-for-like basis after adjusting for sector mix.

That spread — seven percentage points between the top and bottom of the senior labor market in a single year — is the largest we’ve recorded since we started keeping internal data in 2022. To give you a sense of what those numbers actually look like in context:

This bifurcation is the structural story of 2025 and 2026 so far, and it has consequences. The intuition many candidates carry — that "the comp market" moves as a single thing, and a rising tide lifts everyone — is no longer how it works. Whether your seniority is paying more or less this year depends substantially on which line of the bifurcation you’re sitting on.

Why is the top growing faster than the rest? Three reinforcing forces. First, scarcity at the top. The pool of executives who have run a Fortune 1000 finance function, a 500-engineer organization, or a Phase 3 clinical program is, for any particular search, often fewer than fifty people. When demand picks up — as it has in finance and AI — that pool is bid against itself. Second, public-board accountability. Public-company boards in 2025 explicitly approved larger CEO and CFO packages as a response to shareholder pressure on retention. We saw multiple offers in our dataset where the Board justified the package by reference to a comparable peer-group benchmark we had run for them. Third, the leverage of carried interest and equity at top private companies, which we discuss in detail in section 9.

The middle and bottom of the senior market lack all three of these forces. Director-level talent is plentiful, not bid against itself in most searches. There’s no shareholder pressure to retain a specific Director. And the equity packages at that level are typically too small to matter in negotiation terms. Result: real wages, in this segment, have been roughly flat for three years.

Finance & capital markets

The finance practice was our largest single category in 2025: 98 placements, of which 38 were in the New York metro and 24 were in Texas (across Austin, Dallas, and Houston). The structure of finance compensation in 2026 is the most predictable of any sector we cover — nearly every senior offer is a variant of base + target bonus + equity or carried interest — but the relative weights and the absolute numbers have shifted materially.

For Chief Financial Officer roles at companies in the $500M to $5B revenue range, headquartered in or operating primarily out of New York, our 2025 dataset shows the following:

The 75th-percentile equity figure of $1.1M is worth pausing on. Three years ago, this number would have sat closer to $400K for the same role. The shift reflects a meaningful change in how PE-backed and pre-IPO companies are paying senior finance leadership: equity-at-grant is now routinely the largest component of the package, not a sweetener on top of cash. This is both an opportunity (upside is real if the company exits well) and a risk (the rest of the package is often noticeably lighter 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.

Below the CFO level, the story is less generous. Median base for a Controller at a $1B+ company in New York held at $245K in 2025, virtually unchanged from 2023 in nominal terms (and meaningfully down in real terms once you account for inflation). VP Finance, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, Director of Tax — all roles in the $200K–$320K base range — have seen comp stagnate. We’ve had several conversations with candidates at this level who are surprised, on receiving an outside offer, to find that the offer is essentially their current package with a one-time sign-on bonus to bridge the gap. The compression is real.

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. — Elena Weiss, Talent Partner · Finance Practice

The other meaningful sub-trend in finance: Texas has materially reshaped the finance hiring map. Of our 24 Texas finance placements in 2025, 18 were in Dallas-Fort Worth at firms that either relocated their HQ to Texas or maintained meaningful Texas operations. The compensation in DFW is now within 10–15% of NYC for equivalent CFO roles — and after state-tax adjustment, often net-of-tax higher. We dig into the Texas finance migration in detail in a separate piece.

Technology & engineering

If finance is the most predictable sector in our dataset, technology is the most volatile. The Bay Area technology compensation market in 2026 has bifurcated more sharply than any other sector we cover, and the bifurcation is no longer linear. Same job title, same engineering team size, same industry — and we’ve seen total compensation ranges from $480K to over $2 million for the same role profile depending solely on which company is hiring.

This is, candidly, an unusual chart. In the same time frame, the same labor pool, doing essentially the same job, comp at one type of employer rose 62% and at another fell 8%. There’s no economic theory that explains both sides cleanly. What there is, instead, is a two-sided narrative: capital is flooding into AI infrastructure and applied AI in a way it isn’t flooding into mature SaaS, and the comp packages reflect that. The market for the same person is genuinely splitting in two.

Why the AI premium is so large reduces to two specific dynamics. The first is genuine talent scarcity. The set of engineering leaders who have credibly run a large-scale ML infrastructure team is small — by our count, fewer than eight hundred people in the entire United States, and fewer than three hundred of those have managed engineering organizations above fifty people. When a foundation-model company or large AI-infrastructure company opens a VPE search, they are typically competing for a subset of those three hundred people with three to five other companies running parallel searches.

The second is the equity-grant inflation that the AI-native segment is exhibiting. A typical VPE at a Series C AI company today receives an initial equity grant of 0.3–0.7% of fully diluted equity, valued at the most recent round. With those companies often carrying primary valuations of $5–$50 billion, the face value of even a 0.3% grant is $15–$150 million. The 409A discount and vesting risk mean the realized number will be a fraction of this, but the headline is what closes the candidate.

The corresponding compression at public, post-IPO software companies is the same dynamic in reverse. Public-company stock-comp packages were set in 2022–2023, when the share prices were higher. As share prices declined and refresh grants in 2024–2025 were sized based on then-current prices, the dollar value of new grants fell. A VPE who joined a public SaaS company in mid-2022 has, on average, seen the dollar value of their unrealized equity decline 20–35% over three years — and the new grants haven’t fully made up the gap.

Beyond the VPE level, we see meaningful variance across other senior engineering roles. Director of Engineering at public tech firms in our 2025 dataset showed median total comp of $415K (Bay Area), up only $5K from 2024. Senior Engineering Manager showed median total comp of $325K, essentially flat. The premium for AI specialization, however, applies all the way down the ladder — we placed multiple Senior Engineering Managers at AI-native companies with total comp at or above $650K.

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 had the smallest dataset in 2025 — 38 placements — but the most internally consistent trend: compensation is rising at companies with positive clinical data and falling at companies without it.

Chief Medical Officer roles at clinical-stage biotech firms with positive Phase 2 or Phase 3 readouts in 2024 saw median total comp grow 11.2% year-over-year. The same role at companies with stalled or failed trials — a not-uncommon outcome in our sample — saw compensation decline. In several cases we negotiated, the structure was heavily weighted toward performance-vesting equity tied to specific clinical milestones. The headline number on the offer letter looked competitive; the realized comp depended substantially on whether the next trial succeeded.

The single most active sub-segment of our 2025 life-sciences practice was metabolic disease and weight-loss therapeutics. The follow-on success of GLP-1 receptor agonists has reshaped capital allocation across biotech, and the talent market has followed. We placed eleven senior leaders in this space alone — CMOs, VPs of Clinical Development, Heads of Commercial — with median base salaries 18% higher than comparable roles in cardiovascular or oncology. Sign-on bonuses in this sub-segment averaged $250K, up sharply from $125K 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 $720K in 2025, up 4.8% 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 org tells a cleaner, more concentrated story than the engineering side: variable compensation is up, base salary is flat. Across 87 sales and revenue placements in our 2025 dataset, median base salaries rose just 2.1%, while median on-target variable compensation rose 14.3%. Companies are pushing more of the senior revenue-team package into pay-for-performance, and they are willing to fund larger plans when the performance materializes.

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

The structural detail worth flagging is the rise of meaningful accelerator structures. The multiplier on commission rates beyond plan attainment used to be capped around 1.5× in most senior sales-leader packages. In 2025, we saw five offers with accelerators of 2.5× or higher for over-quota performance. The arithmetic creates a powerful incentive: a CRO who overdelivers by 30% on a $5M new-business target could realize $400K+ in incremental commission alone in a single year. This structure barely existed three years ago and is now a genuine negotiating lever.

Marketing leadership tells a different story than sales. Median Chief Marketing Officer compensation in our 2025 dataset was $545K total, essentially flat year-over-year. Sub-segments diverged, however. CMOs at AI-native and FinTech companies showed total comp 22% above the median; CMOs at traditional consumer-goods and retail companies were 14% below. The premium for being adjacent to the high-growth sectors flows down through marketing as it does through engineering.

One sub-segment in 2025 that surprised even us: VP of Brand and Creative roles. Long under-paid relative to growth and demand-gen marketing peers, brand leadership saw median total comp grow 11.4% in 2025 as companies came to terms with the reality that performance marketing alone wasn’t producing efficient growth. The pendulum, in our placements at least, is swinging back toward investment in brand — and the comp reflects that.

Legal & general counsel

The legal practice is smaller (29 placements in 2025) but high-leverage — almost all retained engagements at the General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, or M&A Partner level. The market here is steady, with comp tracking inflation closely — median total comp growth of 3.4% across our 2025 legal placements.

The most interesting structural development is the emergence of dedicated AI Counsel roles as a distinct senior position. We placed seven AI-specific in-house counsel roles in 2025, with company types ranging from Series C startups to a Fortune 500 incumbent. Median base for those roles was $310K, with equity packages averaging $185K. Both of those numbers are meaningfully above the equivalent generalist Senior Counsel role at the same companies. The premium for AI-regulatory specialization is now real, large, and almost certainly growing as state and federal AI regulation matures.

General Counsel roles at $1B+ public companies remained the apex of the legal pay structure: median total comp of $1.45M, with equity grants comprising more than half of the package. Sign-on bonuses at this level grew meaningfully — median $250K in 2025, up from $150K in 2023 — as companies competed for the relatively small pool of GCs willing to switch from comparable seats.

Geography & cost-of-living math

Beyond sector, the geography of US senior compensation has shifted materially. The pay gap between SF/NYC and the secondary markets has not collapsed in the way some pundits predicted in 2020–2021, but the cost-of-living gap has widened, and the after-tax math is now meaningfully different.

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

What this table doesn’t show is what determines actual disposable income: cost of housing, state and local taxes, and the household-level decisions about education and quality of life. A VP earning $465K in Austin and paying no state income tax often nets out roughly comparable to a VP earning $612K in NYC after taxes and housing differential — with the larger remaining quality-of-life delta being a matter of personal 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 hypothetical exercise. Of the 412 placements in our dataset, 47 involved an interstate relocation. Of those 47, 32 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 measured, accelerating trend, and the comp deltas you see in the table above are part of 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 biggest structural change in 2025 senior US compensation wasn’t the magnitude of pay — it was the architecture of equity. Three trends, each of which materially changes the math of accepting one offer versus another.

First, refresh grants are getting smaller but more frequent. The traditional structure was a large 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 moving to smaller, more frequent refreshes — bi-annual or even quarterly — which has two effects. It reduces year-over-year volatility in realized comp, which the companies see as a feature. And it tightens the golden handcuffs, since you’re always inside a relatively recent vesting window. Walking away costs more.

Second, performance-vesting equity (PSUs) is back in fashion. Roughly 18% of senior offers we negotiated in 2025 included some form of performance-vesting equity. In 2022, that share was under 5%. This is particularly common at PE-backed companies and at public tech firms with newer CEOs who are trying to align senior-team comp with operational metrics rather than just stock-price performance. The candidate side of this trade has been mixed — PSUs that pay out are typically more valuable than equivalent time-vesting grants, but the realization rate is lower, and the metrics tied to vesting are sometimes outside the candidate’s direct control.

Third, sign-on grants have grown materially. The one-time sign-on grant — usually cash or RSUs vesting on a 12-month cliff — has crept up from a median of $75K in 2023 to $145K in 2025 for our VP-level placements. The driver: companies are using sign-on grants to bridge the gap between target base and what candidates’ current employers will counter with. The sign-on is the most flexible single component of an offer, and when the rest of the package is band-constrained, it’s where the negotiation happens.

If you take only one piece of practical advice from this report, take this: in 2026, the structure of an equity package matters more than the headline grant number. The same $1M of equity, vesting over 3 years versus 6, with versus without performance triggers, with versus without acceleration on change of control, can carry an expected-value difference of $300K to $500K. Most candidates — including the ones in our dataset who later said they wish they’d negotiated harder — focus on the headline. The structure is where the actual money is.

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 matters more than title. A VP Engineering at an AI-native company and a VP Engineering at a post-IPO public software company are doing roughly the same job for very different money. Choose your sector before you choose your role. The same logic applies in finance (PE-backed vs. public), healthcare (positive-data vs. stalled-trial biotech), and to a lesser degree in sales (high-growth vs. mature). The "what kind of company" question now has a larger comp impact than the "what title" question.

Geography is a real lever. The pay gap between SF/NYC and Austin/Miami has not closed, but the cost-of-living gap has widened. Net-of-tax, net-of-rent, the secondary markets often produce better disposable-income outcomes — particularly for dual-income households and for executives who would otherwise be in the highest state-tax brackets. Whether this trade is right for you depends substantially on personal factors (family, schools, professional network depth), but the financial side of the math has tilted further in favor of relocation than it was three years ago.

Negotiate structure, not just numbers. The bifurcation of senior US comp means the gap between a good package and a great one is increasingly about how the equity is structured, what the severance triggers are, whether refreshes are guaranteed, and how acceleration works on change of control. Most candidates — in our experience — spend 80% of their negotiation energy on base salary, where the flex is smallest. The leverage is elsewhere.

If you’d like a confidential conversation about how your current compensation compares to our 2025–2026 dataset, or about how to think through a specific offer you’re considering, drop us a note. We do this kind of benchmarking weekly for senior professionals who aren’t actively on the market but want a reality check.

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:

Comp benchmarks based on title alone are no longer reliable. The 75th-percentile VPE salary at a Series C AI company has almost nothing to do with the 75th-percentile VPE salary at a public B2B software company. If your compensation committee is using a generic "tech VP" benchmark, you’re either materially over- or under-paying. The best clients we work with run two benchmarks: one against direct industry peers (e.g., other Series C AI infrastructure firms), and one against the specific competitive set the candidate is choosing between.

The window between offer and signature has shortened. Median time from offer extension to counter-signature in our 2025 finance and tech placements was 8 days, down from 13 days in 2023. Candidates are moving faster because they have more competing offers; the days of leaving a senior offer on the table for two weeks while the candidate "thinks about it" are mostly behind us. If your internal approval process can’t move at this pace, you’re effectively pricing yourself out of senior searches.

Sign-on bonuses are increasingly the closing lever. Candidates with unvested equity at their current employer face a "make-whole" calculation when considering a move. The most effective way to bridge that gap, in our 2025 negotiations, was a sign-on grant calibrated to the candidate’s specific unvested equity timeline. Generic sign-on amounts are less effective; modeled-to-the-candidate sign-on amounts close. If your offer-package framework doesn’t allow custom sign-on calibration, you’re leaving deals on the table.

Methodology & caveats

This report is built from 412 verified, signed-and-accepted offer letters from senior US placements made by Crimson Talent 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 reported 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 is not yet known for 2025 in most cases). 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 closed without a hire. Our sample is therefore biased toward successful matches — offers that were both attractive to candidates and acceptable to clients. That bias is worth knowing about, as it likely understates how aggressive some hypothetical offers might be in a different segment of the market.

Year-over-year comparisons control for company stage and sector mix where possible. Where the underlying mix has shifted dramatically (e.g., AI-native companies were a much smaller share of our 2022 dataset), we’ve flagged this in the relevant section.

This report does not constitute legal, financial, or compensation advice. Past performance and historical comp 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@crimsontalent.com.

The annual report is authored by Madison Reyes (Managing Partner) with substantial contributions from Elena Weiss on the finance practice, Rachel Mendez on technology, Marcus Okafor on healthcare and life sciences, Daniel Okafor on regional dynamics, and the Crimson Talent research team on data assembly and analysis.