When a company hires a chief marketing officer, most of the argument is about the package. That is the small number. The big number is the marketing budget the CMO will control before they leave, and at the largest companies they leave sooner than any other core C-suite leader except the COO. Price that number first, and the question of whether you need a full-time CMO at all gets a lot clearer.
Two numbers worth putting side by side
The first is tenure. Spencer Stuart's CMO Tenure 2026 study, published in January 2026 and covering the 346 named CMOs of S&P 500 companies as of June 30, 2025, puts average CMO tenure at 4.1 years, against 5.0 years for all C-suite roles at those companies. Only COOs were shorter. In consumer companies the average was 3.5 years.
The second is budget. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, fielded January to March 2026 with 401 marketing leaders and released May 11, 2026, found marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up only slightly from 7.7% in 2025.
Average tenure of S&P 500 CMOs, against 5.0 years for the C-suite overall. Consumer-company CMOs averaged 3.5 years.
Spencer Stuart, CMO Tenure 2026 (346 S&P 500 CMOs as of June 30, 2025)The worked calculation
Multiply the two and you get the budget a typical CMO steers across one tenure. At 7.8% of revenue for 4.1 years:
- $25M revenue: about $1.95M a year, or roughly $8.0M across the tenure.
- $60M revenue: about $4.68M a year, or roughly $19.2M across the tenure.
- $150M revenue: about $11.7M a year, or roughly $48.0M across the tenure.
Now set the package against it. Assume, purely for illustration, a $350,000 all-in annual cost for a full-time CMO at the $60M company. Over 4.1 years that is about $1.4M, or roughly 7% of the $19.2M budget the same person directs. The salary negotiation gets the board's attention. The budget is where the money actually goes.
Marketing budget a CMO would steer across an average 4.1-year tenure at a $60M company spending 7.8% of revenue on marketing. Directional, not a benchmark.
ETHOSLINK calculation combining Spencer Stuart (tenure) and Gartner (budget share)Be clear about what this calculation is. It combines two sources with different samples. Spencer Stuart's tenure figure is S&P 500 only, and Gartner says the vast majority of its respondents report revenue above $1 billion. Mid-market companies spend very different shares of revenue on marketing depending on the business model, so treat the output as directional and replace 7.8% with your own budget. The point survives any reasonable input: the budget across a tenure is many times the cost of the person.
The same Gartner survey adds a second reason to care about who controls that money: 56% of CMOs said their marketing organization lacks the budget it needs to deliver its 2026 strategy. Budgets are flat and expectations aren't. The value of a marketing leader is therefore mostly in allocation, deciding what to stop as much as what to fund, and allocation skill is exactly what a first-time leader has had the least chance to prove.
You are not hiring a $350,000 executive. You are handing someone a multi-million-dollar budget for about four years.
The first-timer question
Spencer Stuart reports that 73% of S&P 500 CMOs are first-time CMOs. Only 27% had held the title at another organization. That is not a criticism; most excellent CMOs were first-timers once. It does mean that, even at the largest companies, the most likely hire has never owned the seat they are being given. We saw the same pattern in finance, where most new CFOs are also first-timers (The First-Time CFO Majority).
Short tenure is not the same as failure, either. Of the 218 CMO exits Spencer Stuart tracked between 2021 and 2025, 62% were promoted internally or moved to a similar or bigger role elsewhere, 9% became CEOs, and 77% of those who left landed at a new company within six months. The market recycles good CMOs quickly. The practical consequence for you is that your marketing plan has to survive the seat turning over, because it probably will.
Decide the seat before you search for it
The same study found that 31% of S&P 500 companies have no enterprise CMO. Marketing in those companies reports into a chief commercial officer, a chief revenue officer or a chief customer officer. If a third of the largest companies have chosen a different shape for the seat, a $60M company should not assume the shape before asking three questions.
- Is the problem strategy or execution? If positioning, the ideal customer and the budget mix are unclear, you need senior judgment for a defined period, which is what a fractional CMO is for. If the strategy is sound and the machine needs running every day, a full-time hire or a strong head of marketing makes sense.
- Does marketing own revenue or support it? If the real issue is a pipeline that doesn't convert, the seat you need may be a CRO or revenue operations, not marketing at all. We covered that diagnosis in Your Pipeline Isn't Broken. Your Revenue System Is.
- What does the seat look like at month 24? If you can't describe the job two years out, you aren't ready to make a permanent hire against it.
Where a fractional CMO fits
A fractional CMO working two or three days a week can set positioning, reallocate the budget and put measurement in place for a fraction of the full-time cost. After that there are three honest outcomes. The fractional executive stays, because the company doesn't need more. Or the work proves the company needs a permanent CMO, and the fractional holds the seat while we run the search, the path we call Bridge-to-Hire. Or it turns out the seat belongs under revenue leadership. Each outcome comes with a written job description that was tested in the business rather than guessed at. We set out the general decision in Fractional vs. Full-Time.
What this is not
This is not an argument against full-time CMOs. A company with a large budget, several brands or a consumer business that lives on marketing needs a permanent leader, and a well-run search for one is worth doing properly. The argument is narrower: make the decision with the budget in front of you, not just the salary. If the number at stake is $19M, the first few months should go on getting the shape of the seat right, before anyone signs an offer.
If you're weighing a marketing leader now, our Fractional CMO page explains how the engagement works, and The Number-Two Seat looks at the other C-suite chair most growing companies leave empty.