Starting back in 2023, CTO Craft and our trusted partner Albany run a compensation survey for senior technology leaders. We do it because the numbers in circulation are too often partial, dated, or stripped of the context that makes them useful. Title alone tells you almost nothing. Funding stage, team size, reporting line, and geography all shift what the package around a role is actually worth, and most public benchmarks don’t account for that.
This is the fourth year we’ve run the survey now, meaning we’re no longer just taking a quick snapshot. Instead, we’re watching trends and patterns develop, and seeing other factors take a back seat.
Albany has been our partner on this report since the beginning, and they bring something that data alone can’t. As specialists in technology and product leadership hiring, they see compensation being negotiated in real time, across funding stages, geographies, and role types. Besides partnering on the report, their commentary is grounded in live market experience, particularly around how packages are structured when leaders move between roles, and what both candidates and businesses get right and wrong.
Seven Key Findings
Negotiation confidence is a lot lower than it should be. Less than half of technology leaders feel confident negotiating their own compensation, with that confidence dropping even further when the conversation takes place in an already existing role rather than during a career move. These people are managing sizeable budgets and complex programmes, yet many find the internal salary conversation harder than any external negotiation. On top of this, a small but notable group avoided the discussion altogether.
Where you work matters almost as much as what you do. A title is only part of the compensation picture. Funding stage shapes the architecture of a package significantly, with later stage venture-backed companies sitting at the top end and earlier-stage or bootstrapped businesses trading lower cash for equity. Leaders evaluating an offer should understand the circumstances of a company before reading the salary.
Equity and long-term incentives follow very different playbooks depending on funding stage. Most respondents hold some form of LTIP, but what that means varies across the market. Venture capital backed companies, private equity backed companies, public companies, and bootstrapped businesses all use long-term incentives differently, with different instruments, risk profiles, and probabilities of payout. A headline equity figure without instrument type, vesting terms, and realistic exit timeline isn’t a compelling offer, and candidates know that.
Benefits are more variable than they should be. Around a quarter of respondents received no non-monetary benefits at all. For a cohort that includes CTOs at private equity backed and publicly listed companies, that’s a big gap. Benefits tend to reflect company maturity, and candidates often undercount the value of benefits when reviewing offers.
A significant proportion of respondents are considering leaving their current role in the next six months. The figures have shifted slightly year on year, but the driving factors really haven’t. Leadership quality and cultural alignment dominate both the reasons to leave and the reasons to stay, while compensation sits much nearer the bottom end of the list. Culture and leadership appearing at the top of both reasons to leave or stay just goes to show the colossal impact of these factors.
Flexible working has stabilised. Hybrid remains the most dominant model, with remote-working close behind and full-time office attendance still very much a minority. The office premium that some predicted would emerge as employers tried to push for a return to in-person work doesn’t appear to have translated in this data.
AI, data, and ML strategy is now a core part of the CTO remit. A clear majority of CTOs and CTPOs now carry direct accountability for it, and the drop-off below VP level is sharp. AI strategy has become a standard executive expectation rather than just a specialist function, and candidates who can’t speak credibly to it are being screened out.
Five Deep Dives
Beyond the headline findings, this year’s report dives deeper into the data and examines the whole picture to give you specific and actionable insights.
- Equity emerges as the strongest retention variable in the dataset, and the report breaks down why salary alone doesn’t make enough of a difference regarding individuals wanting to move on. This signal has held across all four years of the survey, which makes it the kind of structural finding that should change how boards look at such issues.
- Splitting retention drivers by seniority reveals two genuinely different playbooks. CTOs and Directors leave for different reasons, and the interventions that retain one group don’t necessarily retain the other. The deep dive lays out what each looks like in practice and where employers most commonly get the diagnosis wrong.
- Gender is examined as a set of four structural disadvantages that compound over time rather than as a simple pay gap. The headline figures can be misleading, and the deeper structural patterns around LTIP access, negotiation confidence, and avoidance of compensation conversations tell a more complete story.
- A separate dive into private equity-backed compensation explores what the report calls the private equity paradox, where headline numbers suggest one thing and realised value often tells another. The trade-offs between private equity and venture capital compensation architecture are mapped out in detail, with practical questions for leaders evaluating offers in either environment.
- Remote work gets its own treatment too, with retention and burnout data that complicates the headline that remote and hybrid roles command the same pay as office-based ones. Flexibility has become a baseline expectation, but it comes with a responsibility to design sustainable working conditions, particularly for senior people whose boundaries are hardest to protect.
The full 2026 CTO Craft x Albany Compensation Survey Report is available to download here
