Promotion opportunities abound for CFO hopefuls

Trends from the first half of 2025 suggest that opportunity is knocking for finance professionals seeking a CFO role — particularly those seeking an in-house promotion.

Less than one-quarter of sitting CFOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies came into their current role directly from another CFO chair, according to the midyear Crist Kolder Associates Volatility Report. Excluding seven sitting CFOs across 663 companies placed as a part of mergers, just 23.2% of sitting CFOs arrived directly from another CFO role.

And, among CFOs hired over the first half of 2025, external hiring was down 40%, standing at 28.2% compared with 47.1% for the entirety of 2024. More internal hiring means more chances for current employees to ascend to the CFO role.

Specifically in the financial industry, all CFO hires over the first half of 2025 were internal candidates.

How common is it for CFO seats to open at large companies?

Last year, one CFO change occurred for every 6.6 companies researched for the 2024 report, affecting roughly 15% of companies.

In all of 2024, Crist Kolder identified 102 CFO seat changes among 671 companies, including 75 in the first half of the year. The current year featured 71 changes at the midpoint.

Over the first half of 2025, between the volume of CFO hires and the general preference for promoting from within, about 1 in 13 companies in the report hired an internal candidate to fill a vacant CFO seat.

More findings of note from the research:

• On the CEO side, 53 companies named a new chief executive in the first half of 2025 (one change for every 12.6 companies). The average tenure of sitting CEOs was 7.5 years. For CFOs, it was 4.7 years.

• Female representation among CEOs and CFOs changed little between 2024 and the first half of 2025. But, dating to the first year of the report (2015), women occupy 17.5% of CFO seats compared with 12.2% a decade ago and 9.6% of CEO seats compared with 4.3% a decade ago.

• The percentage of ethnically diverse CEOs rose in the first half of 2025 (14.3% vs. 13.5% in 2024), but the CFO numbers fell slightly (14.5% vs. 14.9%).

• More than two in three (68%) sitting CFOs were business majors in college, and among those, more than half (57%) were accounting majors. About one in three (35%) sitting CEOs were business majors, and among those, 31% were accounting majors.

• Roughly 40% of sitting CFOs have public accounting experience.

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Bryan Strickland at Bryan.Strickland@aicpa-cima.com.