VP of Finance Salary Guide 2026

Last updated: August 11, 2026

By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President at KORE1

VP of Finance salaries run $195,000 to $280,000 base in 2026 at most private companies, with PE-backed and pre-IPO seats reaching $300,000 and public-company divisional VPs clearing $340,000. The band is wide because the job is. Two people with the same title, the same team size, and the same revenue behind them can sit $90,000 apart, and the reason rarely appears anywhere in the job description.

Look instead at what the company is about to put this person through.

A first external audit. An ERP cutover. A sponsor who wants to sell inside twenty-four months. Years of experience barely register next to those. Walk a VP of Finance into a quiet quarter at a stable distributor and it is one job. Then hand the next one purchase accounting for an acquisition that closed last Friday and a lender asking why the covenant calculation moved, and it is a different job at a price the market already knows.

A medical device company in Costa Mesa called us in March with a $70 million top line and a req posted at $185,000. That was what the last person made, in 2022, before the company bought a competitor. They had two finalists after six weeks. Neither had sat through a first-year audit. Their bank had asked for audited statements in January. We reopened the search at $225,000, and it closed in five weeks with someone who had already done exactly that twice.

The forty grand was not the expensive part. The four months were.

Now the disclosure, because it should change how you read everything below. KORE1 runs an accounting and finance staffing practice and we get paid when a client hires through us. There is a section near the bottom where I tell you the specific conditions under which you should skip a recruiter entirely and run this yourself. That advice costs me money. It stays because a band you can defend is worth more to both of us than one placement.

What a VP of Finance Earns in 2026

These are the bands we quote. They come from the public trackers below, from offers that closed on our desk this year, and from a few that fell apart over $15,000 because neither side wanted to be the one who moved first.

Federal data sits underneath all of that and reads low, which confuses people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for financial managers at $161,700 as of May 2024, with the bottom tenth under $86,490 and the top tenth above $239,200. BLS also projects 15 percent employment growth from 2024 to 2034 and roughly 74,600 openings a year.

That category holds branch managers, treasury analysts who got promoted, insurance office controllers, and the VP of Finance at a $300 million manufacturer. One median across all of it. Useful for a trend line, useless for an offer letter.

Six Salary Sites, Six Different Answers

Pull the same title across the major trackers and you get a spread of roughly $100,000.

Nobody in that table made a mistake.

Glassdoor’s number is total compensation from people who chose to report it, and people at well-paying companies report more often. PayScale’s panel is full of thirty-person businesses where the VP of Finance also runs HR and signs the insurance renewal. Indeed is reading job postings, and postings advertise the bottom of a band because that is how negotiation works. Salary.com models mid-market base. Built In only sees technology employers, which is why its remote average outruns its New York average.

So the trackers are not disagreeing about a market. They are describing six different markets that happen to share a phrase.

Pick the one whose panel looks like your company, then adjust from there. If none of them looks like you, that is real information too, and it usually means the seat you are scoping is not a standard one.

The Next Eighteen Months Set the Band

Revenue is the proxy everyone reaches for. It is a poor one. A $40 million distributor with one entity, one state, and a compilation instead of an audit is a cheaper VP of Finance job than a $14 million SaaS company carrying deferred revenue, three legal entities, a Series B on deck, and a board that wants monthly cohort economics.

What actually moves the number is the calendar.

These stack, though not cleanly. Somebody who has run an audit and a NetSuite cutover at the same company is worth more than the two premiums added together, because the hard part was sequencing them without blowing the close. Somebody who has done both at different employers, four years apart, is worth roughly one of them.

The premium is not for the event. It is for having already been surprised by it once.

Ask for the specifics in the interview. Which auditor, which year, was it a first year, what was on the request list in week two, what came up in the management letter, and what they would do differently if the same partner walked through the door again on Monday morning. A candidate who lived it answers in about eight seconds. A candidate who watched it happen takes a paragraph to get anywhere.

What the Metro Actually Moves

Two panels, same geography, very different levels. Built In prices technology employers. Indeed prices job postings.

Look at the top row before you use remote as a discount strategy.

Remote sits above every named city on the Built In list, 23 percent above its national figure, and that is not because working from a spare bedroom carries a premium. The companies willing to run finance leadership remotely skew venture-backed, distributed, and complicated, so they pay for it. Open a remote req expecting to save $30,000 and you will spend four months finding out.

The ranking holds across both panels. The level does not, and the gap between them is roughly the gap between what technology companies pay and what the median employer advertises.

We place finance and accounting talent across 30-plus U.S. metros, and the pattern we see in Orange County is worth naming. Irvine, Newport Beach, and Costa Mesa run about 8 to 12 percent under Los Angeles on base for the same scope, and the gap closes to nearly nothing once a candidate has a competing offer from a Westside firm. Cost of living is not the variable. Commute tolerance is.

Bonus, Equity, and the Half of the Offer Nobody Writes Down

Base is the part everybody argues about. It is often not the part that decides the hire.

At a private mid-market company, bonus lands somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of base and it usually pays out, because the targets are budget-driven and the budget is something the VP of Finance helped build. That is close to cash. Treat it as most of the total.

PE-backed is where the offer gets interesting and where candidates get burned. Management incentive units, profits interests, phantom equity, all of it is real and none of it is liquid. A 0.5 percent MIU grant in a $400 million platform sounds like $2 million. After the preferred stack, the hurdle, and the two follow-on acquisitions that dilute you before the exit, it might be $300,000, and it might be nothing if the sponsor holds another four years. Ask for the waterfall. Ask what happens on a change of control, and what happens if you are terminated without cause fourteen months in.

Venture-backed pre-IPO is a different animal again. Options at a strike set two rounds ago, a 409A that has moved, a four-year vest with a one-year cliff nobody mentions until the paperwork. Candidates coming out of a company that never exited are extremely sensitive to this now, and they will discount a grant to zero in their heads while smiling at you across the table.

Glassdoor’s industry medians for this title are worth a look before you benchmark against the wrong sector. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology tops it at $454,982 total pay, then retail and wholesale at $368,871, information technology at $351,252, insurance at $330,010, and media and communication at $284,216. Those are total-pay medians at larger employers, so do not read them as base. Read them as evidence that your industry is a bigger variable than your zip code.

Two Reqs That Are Not Actually VP of Finance Jobs

About a third of the searches that reach us with this title on them are mislabeled. Two shapes, and they fail in opposite directions.

The controller req wearing a better title. The company wants a clean close, tight AR, a smooth audit, and someone to manage three accountants. That is a controller. Titling it VP of Finance to attract stronger applicants works, right up until you hire someone who expects to own forecasting and board reporting, discovers the CEO already does both, and leaves in eleven months. You paid a $30,000 title premium for turnover. Our 2026 controller salary guide has the bands for the job you actually described.

The CFO req with a VP budget. Fundraising, lender relationships, board strategy, capital structure, all real CFO work, priced at $210,000 because that is what finance approved. These searches do not fail loudly. They stall. Finalists take the interview, hear the scope, look at the number, and go quiet, and the req sits open through two quarters while everyone blames the market. If the seat carries the board, read the 2026 CFO salary guide and go get the budget.

The honest test is one question. Who defends the forecast to the board when it misses?

If the answer is the CEO or an existing CFO, you have a VP of Finance. If the answer is this new person, alone, in a room with directors who did not hire them, you have a CFO req and you should stop pretending otherwise.

The Market You Are Hiring Into

Supply is the thing most comp models ignore, and it moved hard.

The AICPA Trends report counted 55,152 accounting bachelor’s and master’s graduates in the 2023 to 2024 academic year, down 6.6 percent, following declines of 9.6 percent and 7.4 percent in the two years before that. New CPA exam candidates fell from 42,626 in 2023 to 28,082 in 2024. Those graduates are not VPs of Finance today. They are the reason the 2032 bench is thin, and the reason the people who are ready right now get to name a number.

The Controllers Council surveyed finance executives in May and June of 2026 and found controllers and assistant controllers the hardest finance roles to fill, cited by 44 percent, ahead of accounting and financial reporting at 34 percent and FP&A at 30 percent. Controllers have held that top spot four years running.

Read what that means one level up. The controller market is the feeder market for VP of Finance. When it is that tight, internal promotion stops being an option for the companies that would normally use it, and they enter the external market at the same time you do.

Technology is not rescuing anyone yet either. Gartner found 84 percent of CFOs have not yet seen a return on their finance AI investments, while nearly 60 percent plan to raise that spending by 10 percent or more in 2026. Automation is absorbing reconciliations and variance commentary. It is not absorbing the judgment call about whether revenue is recognizable, and that judgment is most of what you are buying at this level.

What Hiring Teams Ask Us About VP of Finance Pay

We got quotes from $155K to $256K. What do we actually put in the budget?

Take $195,000 to $240,000 for an audited private company between $25 million and $100 million in revenue, then add for whatever is on your eighteen-month calendar, because that is the part of the job the trackers never see. That band covers most mid-market searches without overpaying or stalling.

The spread across the trackers is not noise. It is six panels of different companies filed under one phrase. Find the panel that resembles yours, use it as a floor, and price your complexity on top. Then hold the number, because the version where you post low and quietly raise it after eight weeks costs more than starting correctly.

Is this really a VP of Finance job, or a controller job with a nicer title?

Wrong question first, slightly. Ask who owns the forecast. If the CEO builds the plan and this person reports on it, you scoped a controller. If this person builds the plan, defends it, and staffs the team that runs it, it is a VP of Finance.

Getting this wrong is the single most common reason a finance leadership search goes sideways. We see it constantly. The title attracts VP-level applicants, the job description describes controller work, and the finalist figures it out in the third interview. Retitling the req after that point rarely recovers the candidate.

How much does the bonus actually matter at this level?

More than candidates admit and less than employers assume. At a private company, a 20 percent bonus tied to a budget the VP of Finance helped write pays out most years, so treat it as near-cash. A 40 percent bonus tied to an exit is a lottery ticket with a job attached.

Structure matters more than size. Show the actual metric, the historical payout percentage for each of the last three years, and whether the plan is discretionary or formulaic, because a candidate who has been burned once will ask anyway. A candidate weighing two offers will take the smaller bonus with a published formula over the bigger one with “board discretion” in the plan document, and they are right to.

Our sponsor wants to exit in about two years. Does that change the offer?

$30,000 to $50,000 on base, plus equity units, and start the search sooner than feels comfortable. Sell-side diligence is a specific skill. You want someone who has already produced a quality-of-earnings package under deadline, not someone learning what one is.

There is a second effect people miss. Candidates know an exit means their job changes or ends in twenty-four months, so you are competing against the security of wherever they are now. Some price that in as risk and want more. Others want the carry and will take less base to get it. Ask which type you are talking to early, because negotiating the wrong lever wastes three weeks.

Can we open it remote and pay less?

Rarely, and the data says the opposite. Built In has remote VP of Finance roles averaging $245,688 in 2026, above San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Remote widens the pool, which is the real argument for it. It is not a discount.

Where remote genuinely helps is speed and specialization. Say you need somebody who has run SOX scoping inside a medical device company. Forty of those people live in your metro. Four hundred live in the country. Widening to the second number is the whole reason to do it.

How long should this search take?

Six to twelve weeks from open req to signed offer when the band is right and the scope is agreed between the CEO, the board, and whoever owns the budget. Longer if it is confidential, and considerably longer if the title and the budget describe different jobs.

Sourcing is almost never the slow part. Internal alignment is. The searches that run fast are the ones where the CEO, the board, and finance settled what the seat owns before anything got posted. The ones that drag are the ones where that conversation happens during interviews, in front of finalists, which candidates read as exactly the disorganization it is.

We already use a fractional CFO. Do we still need this hire?

Usually yes, and the pairing works well. A fractional CFO gives you board-level judgment a few days a month. A VP of Finance runs the function every day. They solve different problems and companies routinely run both for years before a full-time CFO makes sense.

The failure mode is using a fractional engagement to postpone an operational hire. Your fractional CFO cannot close the books, manage three accountants, and rebuild the forecasting model on eight days a month, and asking them to is how you end up paying consultant rates for staff-level work. Our fractional CFO services page covers where that line sits.

Set the Band Before You Post the Req

Every mispriced finance leadership search we get pulled into has the same origin. Somebody took the last person’s salary, added a cost-of-living bump, and posted it. Nobody wrote down what the next eighteen months contain.

Spend twenty minutes with the calendar table. Count the entities. Be honest about the audit and the ERP project you keep deferring. Price the job the person will actually hold in month nine, not the one the org chart shows today.

Then commit to the number and stop negotiating with yourself.

Four signals the band is already wrong, in the order we usually spot them.

• The req has been open more than ten weeks and sourcing is not the complaint.
• Finalists keep withdrawing after the second interview, which almost always means the scope grew in the room and the number did not.
• You cannot answer, in one sentence, who defends the forecast to the board.
• The last person in the seat left for a company you would describe as smaller.

Here is when you do not need us. Single entity, under $30 million, no audit, no transaction, no system migration, and you already have a strong internal candidate or a referral from your outside CPA firm. Run that search yourself. It takes about five weeks, the qualified pool in your market is small enough that you can work it by hand, and a recruiter adds very little beyond an invoice you did not need.

Where we earn a fee is the confidential replacement of a sitting VP of Finance, the PE-backed search with a transaction clock on it, and the role that needs somebody who has already survived a specific mess. Those go out as a direct hire search and they take real work. KORE1 has placed finance and technology talent since 2005, our recruiters average 15-plus years on the desks they cover, and 92 percent of the people we place are still in the seat twelve months later, which on a leadership hire is the only number I weigh above the salary.

Two things worth doing before you post. Benchmark the specific scope rather than the title, which is what our salary benchmark assistant is built for. And read the search side, because pricing is only half the problem. How we scope and run these engagements lives on our VP of Finance staffing and executive search page.

If you want a second read on whether your req is priced where the market will actually answer it, talk to one of our accounting and finance recruiters. We will tell you what your scope is worth in your market before anything gets posted, and if the answer is that you should run it yourself, you will hear that too.

Related: Scoping the layer below? The 2026 controller salary guide prices the close. Scoping the layer above? The 2026 CFO salary guide breaks down finance-chief pay, and our accounting and finance staffing page maps the rest of the function we place.