CEO turnover, tenure and the first-time CEO

Russell Reynolds has tracked CEO changes in the major stock market indices since 2018. In 2025, 234 CEOs left, 16 per cent more than in 2024 and 21 per cent above the eight-year average: the second record year in a row. Most of the increase came from outside the United States. In Germany’s DAX the number of departing CEOs went from three to eight and in India’s NIFTY 50 from three to seven, while the S&P 500 held almost steady at 59. The average tenure of a departing CEO fell to 7.1 years, from 8.3 years in 2021. The number of CEOs gone again after 30 to 36 months rose by 79 per cent.

The successor has almost never done the job before. Russell Reynolds found that 86 per cent of new CEOs worldwide were first-timers. Spencer Stuart puts the figure for the S&P 1500 at 84 per cent, and at mid-sized companies as high as 89 per cent, against 76 per cent a year earlier. Two thirds of the 140 first-timers had never sat on the board of a listed company, either as an executive or as a non-executive. Spencer Stuart counted 168 new CEOs in 2025, the highest number since 2010; six in ten were internal appointments. Tenure fell there too, to 8.5 years.

And there is little standing behind that first-timer. DDI surveyed 2,185 HR professionals and 10,796 managers in more than fifty countries: 20 per cent of the HR professionals are confident in their own leadership succession pipeline. That is an improvement on 11 per cent in 2020, but it still means four in five organisations do not know who is ready. In the consumer sector, where turnover is highest at 17 per cent, Russell Reynolds surveyed board directors themselves. Nearly half had no succession plan or did not know whether one existed. Among senior executives and the layer below them, 65 per cent said they had no clear interest in the CEO role, and 73 per cent of that next generation were considering leaving their employer. Most boards start searching twelve to eighteen months before a change; the authors work with a horizon of three to five years.

How solid is this? Four organisations measure the same thing and two of them have been counting for years, but the record is only two years old and the figures on the bench come from a single survey, so the picture is not yet settled. Whether 2026 brings another record will become clear from the quarterly figures Russell Reynolds publishes this year.