CFO turnover on pace to hit highest rate since 2019, Crist Kolder says

Overall CFO turnover is trending at 18.3% for the year and is on track to hit its highest rate since 2019, according to a projection from Crist Kolder Associates.

In 2025, the full-year turnover rate was 18.1%. And, in 2020, when the Covid-19 virus plunged the US into recession, CFO turnover reached 18.2%.

The executive search firm’s mid-year Volatility Report found that as of July 31, 10.7% of the 665 Fortune 500 (2026) and S&P 500 companies it tracks had experienced a change in CFOs this year, including Berkshire Hathaway, Broadcom, and ExxonMobil.

Kirby Perkins, a Crist Kolder managing director and co-producer of the Volatility report, pointed to market choppiness earlier this year as a possible reason for the turnover surge. “Whether it’s good market conditions or bad or poor market conditions, you tend to see an uptick in CFO turnover,” Perkins told CFO Brew.

Frequent job switching by senior executives “doesn’t have the stigma” it once did, Perkins said. She also noted the influx of private equity firms, which are “increasingly picking off CFOs” from the Fortune 500 and S&P 500.

CFOs are getting wooed “into these larger private equity platforms, and they move on a shorter cycle than a public company typically. You see a bit more movement due to that influence of private equity,” Perkins said.

More trends. The Volatility report, which examines the background and turnover of C-suite executives, including CEOs and CFOs, found that most sitting CFOs weren’t CFOs in their prior positions.

Less than one-third, or 28.2%, of chief financial officers worked as CFOs in their previous role. About one-fifth, or 21.4%, were corporate finance executives, while another roughly 12.8% were corporate controllers or chief accounting officers.

While the average age of CFOs appointed in the first seven months of 2026 remained at around 52 years of age, newly minted chief financial officers emerged as the youngest in the past decade. The age at hire for fresh CFOs was 48.2 years, down from 51.9 last year and 49.8 in 2024, according to the Volatility report.

“You have younger, hungrier CFOs running these companies rather than the ‘been there, done that folks,’” Perkins said.

The Volatility report also showed that diversity in the senior management ranks hasn’t changed that much recently. The percentage of companies with female CFOs made up 17% of the total at the 665 companies, up from 15.1% in 2021 but down from a peak of 18.5% in 2023.

Similarly, the population of companies with “ethnically and racially diverse” CFOs has “leveled off,” according to Crist Kolder, with 14.4% of the studied companies having them, after a peak of 14.9% in 2024.