It’s turnover time.
CFO turnover among companies on leading global indexes hit 15.1% in 2024, approaching the record global turnover of 16.2% in 2023, according to leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds’ CFO Turnover Index. Last year 275 new CFOs stepped into the seat, bringing the average CFO tenure to 5.8 years, down from 6.2 in 2023.
Turnover for S&P 500 CFOs was 17.8%. It’s hovered between 17% and 17.8% for the last four years.
One of the main driving factors of the high turnover? Retirement. 54% of outgoing CFOs either retired or transitioned into board roles. Now, 56.6 is the average age when they do so, marking the lowest average in six years, per the report.
The high CFO turnover rate tracked with the similarly steep CEO turnover figures that the leadership firm has also tracked since 2019. Last year, 202 CEOs departed around the world, a 9% increase from 2023.
That has likely impacted CFO tenure as well. “Naturally, a new CEO will want to choose their own executive, perhaps, because their strategy doesn’t align with the current CFO’s retirement horizon,” Jim Lawson, co-leader of Russell Reynolds’ global financial officers practice, said in the report.
Another reason for the high turnover is simple: Being a CFO is stressful. The demands of the role are increasingly expanding, and Lawson anticipates turnover will keep increasing “in light of ongoing activist pressures, with investors wanting to make changes to management teams globally.”
“There are a lot of CFOs that were just exhausted from that continuous cycle of being a public company, working through the quarters, working through kind of one-off debt issuances, and it really just takes a toll over a period of time,” he told CFO Dive.
This report was written by Natasha Piñon and was originally published by CFO Brew.
