Every year, we at CTO Craft, alongside our Trusted Partner Albany, run a Compensation Survey for senior technology leaders.
We do this because senior tech leaders don’t always have a dependable way to understand and navigate compensation at their level. Many of the numbers in circulation are partial, dated, inaccurate, or difficult to compare across role types, leaving too much room for guesswork.
Data-Driven & Strategic
This year marks the 4th annual edition of our compensation survey, a milestone that underscores its evolution into a vital piece of community infrastructure. The survey has become a shared reference point, empowering senior technology leaders to navigate the complexities of the modern talent landscape with confidence.
Whether you are approaching a high-stakes performance review, re-scoping organisational responsibilities, or negotiating a new executive mandate, this report provides the authoritative foundation for those critical conversations.
With this being our fourth edition of the survey we are also able to track change over a greater period of time, instead of treating each set of numbers as a one off snapshot. That matters to us because compensation isn’t static, and neither is the role of a senior tech leader.
The goal is to ensure transparency between leaders and their organisations. We want to empower CTOs and senior engineering leaders to validate their market value in real-time, ensuring that as their strategic remit expands, their compensation remains firmly in lockstep.
Our Partnership With Albany Partners
Albany is CTO Craft’s long standing, highly recommended, strategic partner for all things “Recruitment”.
Many CTO Craft members have used Albany’s excellent services, benefiting from support that ranges from individual career development to recruiting / scaling the teams beneath them.
Albany has a deep understanding of the day-to-day challenges faced by CTOs, senior engineers, and technology leaders so if you don’t know them, we highly recommend you take the opportunity to learn more about them.
Albany brings the know-how, experience, and industry connections needed to address the three critical challenges CTOs face: recruitment, downsizing, and retention.
They offer a close, up-to-date view of the market and hiring landscape for senior technology roles, providing invaluable insight into compensation trends and a clearer understanding of how role scope is evolving.
How the CTO Role Has Shifted and Why the Survey Has Evolved
If you’ve been in a leadership role for a few years, you’ll have seen the shift as scope has expanded, often through a series of incremental changes that accumulate into something significantly different before you even realise.
A modern CTO may be expected to lead AI direction, manage cyber risk, guide platform decisions, own transformation delivery, and support M&A integration all while supporting their team. That’s a broad surface area, and it often comes with a great deal of ambiguity. Even when authority increases, the boundaries of accountability can stay unclear, creating a gap between what a leader is actually responsible for and what the organisation formally recognises them to do.
Compensation structures have been trying to keep up, but they don’t always move at the necessary pace. Often, pay frameworks are designed for steady roles with predictable outcomes. Senior tech leadership is rarely that. The work can be nonlinear, with frequently changing risk profiles and uneven expectations.
In 2026, we’re paying closer attention to where the package meets reality. We’re looking at the scope gap, and at two related questions that come up repeatedly in the community: how confident leaders feel negotiating while already in role, and how much value is actually realised from incentives once payout, vesting, and outcome are considered.
The scope gap is a significant issue as scope creep is often invisible in compensation discussions. Leaders take on additional responsibilities because the business needs it, because the team needs stability, or because the organisation is in motion. Over time, the role becomes larger, yet the compensation can stay anchored to the original job description. By measuring scope and pay together, we can better understand whether responsibility increases are being reflected within compensation.
Negotiation confidence is also important as the context around the role has changed. In some markets, leaders feel pressure to accept uncertainty. In others, leaders see strong demand but mixed budgets. Many leaders also find that negotiating in an existing role is a different challenge from negotiating into a new role.
Realised value matters because promised value can be misleading. Bonuses may be tied to metrics outside a leader’s control. Equity can be valuable and meaningful, but only if the terms are fair, the vesting is realistic, and the broader company trajectory supports it. A package that looks impressive on paper can feel very different after a year of delivery and changed targets. By looking beyond base salary, this survey becomes more aligned with how compensation is lived day-to-day.
The survey also recognises that senior tech roles can’t be compared by title alone. Reporting line, company stage, geography, business model, and transformation mandate all shape accountability. As a result they also shape how packages are put together.
Capturing that context is essential.
Every response is valuable in providing a wider context to the current landscape and the changes that we are experiencing. It makes the findings more representative across industries and regions, and it helps surface where the market is drifting, especially when responsibilities are expanding without a corresponding update in reward.
Whether you’re a CTO, CTPO, VP of Engineering, or senior tech leader (fractional and permanent), please take five minutes and complete the survey. It’s anonymous, designed to be quick, and it directly improves the benchmark that the wider community relies on.
Join your CTO Craft peers and contribute to the 4th Annual Tech Leadership Compensation Survey here.
