The Marquee
Leadership Benchmark 2026.
The Marquee Leadership Benchmark is an annual study of senior appointments: what leadership roles pay, how long searches take, where candidates come from and how long appointments last. It is built from the mandates we run and from practitioners currently holding the roles, rather than from employer surveys.
What the benchmark measures
Four questions organise the study. Each is one a hiring team asks before opening a senior role, and each is poorly answered by the sources ordinarily available.
- What does this role pay? Total compensation rather than base, split by function, seniority and company stage, with the variable half broken out.
- How long does it take to fill? From signed brief to accepted offer, and separately from accepted offer to first day, which is the interval most plans omit.
- Where do the candidates come from? Which organisations senior people actually move between, which is frequently different from the competitor set a company would name.
- How long do they stay? Tenure by function and by route in, including the difference between internal promotions and external appointments.
Why we built it
The sources available to someone pricing a senior role are poor, and they are poor in a specific way that a search firm is unusually well placed to correct.
- Surveys describe what employers report. Useful, consistent, and six to twelve months behind the market by the time they publish.
- Aggregators describe what people volunteer. Current, and thin at the seniority where the decisions are expensive.
- Neither covers timing. How long a role takes to fill, and how often a shortlist ends in a hire, sit beyond the reach of a survey and fall out of a search firm’s own records as a matter of course.
We run these searches, so the timing data and the closed-offer data exist as a by-product of the work. Publishing it is more useful than holding it, and it is checkable in a way that opinion about the market rarely is.
Questions it settles quickly
The study is organised around decisions rather than topics, so most of it reads as an answer to something a reader is already arguing about internally.
- Is this range still competitive? Answered against what offers actually closed at, rather than against what employers reported last autumn.
- Should we expect this search to take a quarter? Answered with time to shortlist and time to offer separately, so a plan is built on the right interval.
- Where would this person come from? Answered with the organisations people at that level actually moved between, which frequently surprises a hiring team.
- Is our attrition at this level unusual? Answered with tenure by function and by route in, which separates a retention problem from a market norm.
Where the study lacks the sample to answer one of these for a particular cut, it says so in that cut rather than in a footnote at the back.
How it is built
The study draws on two sources and states which figure came from which, because they carry different biases and neither is complete alone.
- Mandate data. Anonymised records from searches Marquee has run: brief to shortlist, shortlist to offer, offers accepted and declined, and the packages at which roles actually closed. Current, and shaped by the roles we are asked to fill.
- Practitioner evidence. Structured conversations with people currently holding the roles in question, drawn from the Nextyn network. Smaller samples, and the only source that explains why a number is what it is.
Every figure in the study carries its source, its sample size and its collection window. Where a sample is small enough that the median is unstable, the study says so rather than publishing a confident-looking number.
The limitation worth stating plainly: this describes the market Marquee operates in rather than the whole economy. Our mandate mix shapes which functions and sectors are well represented, and the study names where the coverage is thin instead of smoothing over it.
Who it is for
The study is written for the person who has to make or approve a senior appointment, rather than for a general reader.
- Chief people officers and heads of talent setting ranges for the year and defending them to a board.
- Chief executives and founders pricing a leadership role they are hiring for the first time, where the organisation lacks an internal reference point.
- Boards and remuneration committees testing whether a proposed package sits where the sponsor claims it does.
- Investors assessing whether a portfolio company can realistically hire the team its plan assumes, and in the time the plan assumes.
How to use it
A benchmark is most useful as a starting position and least useful as a conclusion. Three habits get the most out of this one.
- Read the spread before the midpoint. The distance between the median and the upper quartile tells you how contested a role is. A wide spread means the market disagrees about what the job is worth, which is information about the role as much as about the pay.
- Check the comparator set against your own. The study groups by stage and function. Where your competitor set for talent differs from that grouping, adjust before using the figure.
- Read the timing data alongside the pay data. A role priced at the median that takes twice the benchmark time to fill has been priced wrongly, and the timing is usually the earlier signal.
Findings
The 2026 findings are with the team for clearance and will be published here. This section is deliberately empty rather than filled with placeholder figures, because a benchmark publishing a figure it is unable to stand behind has spent the only thing it had.
When it lands, each finding will carry the sample it came from and the window it covers, and the full study will be available on request.
Two things will stay out of it even once the figures clear. Any cut whose sample is small enough to risk identifying a client or a candidate stays unpublished, and any movement we are unable to explain stays described as a movement rather than dressed up as a trend. A benchmark earns its standing slowly and spends it in a single overstated claim.
What changes between editions
The benchmark is annual, and the year-on-year comparison is the part that compounds. Holding the method steady is what makes that comparison meaningful, so the structure stays fixed even where a different cut would read better.
Where the method does change, the study says what changed and republishes the prior year on the new basis, so a movement always reflects the market rather than how it was measured. That is the discipline that separates a benchmark from a marketing document, and it is the reason to keep the two apart.
Frequently asked questions
An annual study of senior appointments covering pay, time to hire, candidate origin and tenure. It is built from anonymised mandate data and from structured conversations with practitioners currently in the roles, rather than from employer surveys.
Leave your work email on this page and we will send it when the edition publishes. The full study goes to people who request it rather than sitting behind a general download, so that we can say who has it and answer questions on it.
Anonymised records from searches Marquee has run, read alongside evidence from practitioners in the roles. Every figure carries its source, sample size and collection window. Where a sample is too small for a stable median, the study says so rather than publishing one.
A survey reports what employers say they pay. This reports what offers actually closed at. It also covers timing, candidate origin and tenure, which surveys rarely reach, and it is more current and less representative than a large survey by construction.
The functions and sectors Marquee runs mandates in, with the coverage stated per cut. The study names where its coverage is thin instead of presenting an even picture it is unable to support. That is the honest limitation of any firm-derived dataset.
Annually. The method is held steady between editions so that year-on-year movement is real. Where the method changes, the prior year is republished on the new basis.
Yes, and citing the edition and the specific cut is worth doing. Boards test where a figure came from before they test the figure. A benchmark quoted with its source, sample and collection window survives that question; one quoted as a round number invites it.
Every figure is aggregated, and individual mandates, clients and candidates stay anonymous. Figures are aggregated and cuts with samples small enough to risk identification are withheld rather than published with a caveat.
