It’s been a tumultuous year, but CEOs have continued to anchor their businesses and stick around. According to Spencer Stuart’s annual 2025 S&P 500 C-Suite Snapshot report, the average sitting CEO this year had a tenure of 7.6 years—nearly three years longer than the average 4.7-year tenure of all other C-suite leaders.

Just over three-quarters of this year’s CEOs were internally promoted, the report found, meaning they’re people who were already dedicated to the company, while possessing a wealth of interior knowledge. But 2025 was a year of new turbulence for business, and 11% of CEOs were newly hired. A total of 17% came from different industries, bringing a new set of tools with them to help solve the company’s problems. And 16% of the newcomers had been CEOs at other companies before.

Most of these CEOs, however, are white men. Among C-suite executive roles, CEO has the lowest proportion of women—just 9%. And only 13% of these leaders come from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. These numbers are down slightly from 2024, which had 11% women CEOs, and 14% who were from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. (Diversity is much higher across the full C-suite, with 35% of positions held by women and 13% by people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds.)

As we enter 2026, businesses will continue to face challenges—both more of the same from this year, as well as those coming from new policies, politics and situations. Successful CEOs will need strategy, innovation, technology and sharp teams behind them, and we look forward to chronicling those challenges and the ways to get through them next year.

We will be taking a publishing break for the holidays, and will not send Forbes CEO on December 29. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday, January 5, 2026.

In the final weeks of 2025, the numbers paint a complicated financial and economic picture—especially since the departments tallying numbers for the federal government likely haven’t fully recovered from October’s government shutdown.

A piece of (maybe) good news:........

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