In just the last year, CEOs at Walmart, Target and Disney have either announced their exits or begun actively planning handoffs, while Apple’s board is reportedly accelerating its own succession timeline.
It turns out, these are not isolated stories. They are the most visible examples of a pattern in which boards are replacing CEOs faster, often turning to first-timers homegrown inside the company, and putting unprecedented pressure on succession planning, leadership pipelines and the CHROs who steward them.
A record-breaking wave
According to Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) 2025 Global CEO Turnover Index, 234 CEOs departed their roles globally last year. This is a 16% increase from 2024 and 21% above the eight-year average. Last year marked the second consecutive year that CEO turnover has reached record levels. In the S&P 500 alone, 59 CEOs departed in 2025, including exits from Kroger, Kohl’s and Tylenol maker Kenvue.
Across all U.S. companies, outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracked more than 2,000 CEO exits last year. Among publicly traded companies specifically, Challenger recorded 446 CEO exits in 2025, the highest annual total on record since the firm began tracking this data in 2002, up from 373 in 2024.
The pace was especially intense early in the year. The first quarter of 2025 saw the highest quarterly total of CEO exits on record, with 646 U.S. leaders departing in those three months alone. While the rate moderated through the second half of the year, annual totals remained well above historical norms.
“The election seemed to set off a wave of leadership exits at the end of 2024 and into the start of last year,” Andy Challenger, labor and workplace expert and chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, noted in the firm’s year-end report. “But after months of rapid-fire change in the face of geopolitical unrest, policy shifts, economic uncertainty and evolving technology, companies are signaling some stability.”
That stability, if it holds, arrives only after tenures themselves have dramatically compressed.
What are the stakes?
The average outgoing CEO tenure fell to 7.1 years in 2025, according to Russell Reynolds, down from 7.4 in 2024 and well below the 8.3-year average recorded in 2021. “CEO turnover reached a new record in 2025,” according to Constantine Alexandrakis, RRA CEO. “Elevated CEO turnover is now a sustained feature of today’s corporate governance landscape.”
As HR Executive previously reported, Russell Reynolds’ mid-2025 data showed the average outgoing tenure at an even steeper 6.8 years for the first half of the year, the lowest since the firm began tracking in 2018. And there is another interesting wrinkle hidden in the data. The proportion of CEOs departing within 30 to 36 months of taking the job increased 79% year over year.
Leadership consulting firm Spencer Stuart analyzed S&P 1500 transitions, a population that adds additional texture to the C-suite picture. The researchers found that nearly 40% of U.S. CEOs who left their jobs in 2025 departed within their first five years. A peek into the CEO life cycle shows that the most successful CEOs diverge meaningfully from lower performers in years three through five of their tenure.
In an environment where nearly four in 10 CEOs don’t make it that far, the stakes around getting succession right, right from the start, have rarely been higher.
“Historically, the first couple of years of a CEO’s tenure were about clarifying the mandate, setting direction and building alignment,” Laura Sanderson, RRA’s EMEAI Board and CEO Advisory co-lead, wrote in the firm’s 2025 index report. “That grace period has been severely compressed.”
Why the revolving door keeps spinning
The causes for departures are layered. Russell Reynolds points to the convergence of record-high activist pressure, with investor activist campaigns up 23% in 2025, along with geopolitical complexity and accelerating technology transformation demands. Boards are raising expectations around performance and pace, making the definition of “effective leadership” more explicit and more compressed than in any previous cycle.
The result is a job that has become structurally harder to sustain. Gartner Chief of Research Peter Aykens, speaking at the firm’s 2025 HR Symposium as covered in HR Executive, described the current leadership environment as a set of “wicked messes”: problems that are complex, interconnected and resistant to clean solutions. He said CEOs today are navigating geopolitical fragmentation, AI strategy with sovereignty implications, supply chain rewiring and workforce expectations that keep shifting, all while delivering results in a narrower window than ever.
RRA also flags a rise in planned successions as a meaningful signal amid the churn. In 2025, 32% of global CEO departures occurred through planned succession, up sharply from 22% in 2024. The firm interprets this as evidence that boards are increasingly treating CEO succession as a strategic governance tool rather than a reactive response to underperformance. Even so, the sheer volume of change means reactive transitions remain common and the HR infrastructure to manage them well is under strain at many organizations.
A younger, greener incoming class
What’s shifting isn’t only the frequency of CEO change. It’s the profile of the leaders taking over.
Spencer Stuart found that 168 new S&P 1500 CEOs were named during 2025, the most since 2010. The surge was broad-based but strongest among smaller companies: Seventy SmallCap 600 companies named new CEOs, the most in a decade. Technology, media and telecommunications saw the sharpest sector-level spike, with transitions nearly doubling from 18 in 2024 to 33 in 2025, the most in more than a decade.
Boards took bold risks on untested leaders in 2025. Russell Reynolds found 86% of global CEO hires were first-timers at public companies. Spencer Stuart’s U.S. data echoed this: Eighty-four percent of 168 new S&P 1500 CEOs (140 total) had never run an enterprise before, and two-thirds also lacked board experience.
And here comes the age shift. Spencer Stuart found that new CEOs in 2025 were younger on average than in 2024, though the breakdown by sector tells a more nuanced story. Incoming CEOs in consumer and financial services averaged the youngest ages, around 52.5 years, while technology, media and telecom skewed older at an average of 57.4, and healthcare came in at 56.
Challenger’s data captures where the broader age trend is most dramatic over time: The average age of departing CEOs reached a record low in December 2025, at 51.5, the youngest monthly average on record since the firm began tracking in 2002. For context, the average age of exiting CEOs was over 63 as recently as 2017.
Patterns in CEO changes
CEOs may be exiting younger because they are expected to prove themselves quickly and fall short, according to Challenger’s year-end report. On the other hand, CEOs’ skills are in high demand, and experienced leaders have the agency to take new opportunities when they arise.
Spencer Stuart found that most first-time CEOs were promoted COOs or divisional CEOs. Healthcare is a notable outlier, with the majority of new chief execs in this sector arriving from external sources. None of the reports accessed for this article indicated CHROs were moving into the CEO position at any notable rate.
Spencer Stuart flagged another unusual pattern: Nineteen new CEOs in 2025 were appointed directly from their company’s board of directors, the most since 2020. The firm notes that board directors are categorized as outsiders because they rarely have the operational depth of a sitting executive, and a board-level appointment often signals that a company was not ready for succession.
The flip side of the broader internal-promotion bet is risk. Russell Reynolds warns that with the rise of short-tenure, “one and done” CEOs, boards are now more dependent than ever on the strength of their internal pipelines and on how deliberately they have prepared those leaders for the actual demands of the role. Eleven CEO appointments globally in 2025 lasted less than a year, signaling a growing board expectation for immediate, visible results.
Read more | Disney’s CEO drama: 3 HR lessons from a bumpy, high-profile succession
What this means for HR
The acceleration of CEO turnover, combined with the persistent preference for first-time internal appointments, sharpens the strategic importance of every layer of the talent infrastructure. It also elevates the role of the CHRO, in shaping who reaches the top and in ensuring those leaders are ready when they get there.
Research from the HR Policy Association and the Center for Executive Succession, covered by HR Executive, found that board directors now identify CHROs as more critical to certain stages of the CEO succession process than outgoing CEOs themselves, including owning the process design. At organizations with strong succession planning practices, CHRO engagement is consistently higher.
As HRPA’s Ani Huang told HR Executive: “In the more successful boards, CHROs are more engaged. In fact, directors identified CHROs as more critical to certain parts of the process than outgoing CEOs, including owning the process itself.”
The CHRO-board relationship also carries implications beyond process design. Russell Reynolds notes that it is as important to invest in the continuing development of a newly appointed CEO as it was to develop them as a high-potential candidate. First-time CEOs stepping into record scrutiny, with compressed timelines for proving themselves, need active support beyond onboarding, and that development mandate belongs to HR.
The CHRO appointment surge HR Executive documented in late 2025 reflects this dynamic in real time. Roughly 10% of S&P 500 companies appointed new chief executives through the first three quarters of 2025, and many of those incoming CEOs have been partnering with new or elevated HR leaders to drive transformation. The two roles are increasingly linked in timing, in mandate and in the shared work of building the leadership bench.
Factors impacting succession planning
According to Gartner data, more than one-quarter of C-suite leaders plan to leave their posts within a year, and more than half within two years. That is the pipeline reality HR leaders are managing in real time, alongside ongoing demands for workforce and technology transformation.
Dan Russell, senior partner and global head of assessment at RHR International, recently told HR Executive it is “rarely too early” to begin succession planning. His firm advises clients to start the succession cycle immediately after a new CEO is seated, treating it as an ongoing talent review rather than a one-time event.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas has also flagged the rise of interim CEO appointments as a warning sign for organizations without built pipelines. In early 2025, 18% of all incoming CEOs were named on an interim basis, compared to just 6% during the same period in 2024.
And one last nugget, according to Challenger: Retirements remain another major contributor. These figures continue to reflect an ongoing generational transition across corporate leadership, even as retirement totals remain below stepped-down departures.”
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