CFO turnover: CFO changes counted from Item 5.02 filings, by month and kind

From June 1 to November 10, 2026, the CFO Tribune record holds 461 Form 8-K Item 5.02 filings in which 420 companies reported a change of chief financial officer. Split by kind, 189 are transitions from one named CFO to a named successor, 100 are interim appointments, 91 are departures with no successor named and 81 are appointments with no predecessor in the same filing.

That is a count of filings, not a rate. The record begins on June 1, 2026, it reads every company that files an 8-K with EDGAR rather than a fixed panel, and it has no reliable count of how many companies had a CFO seat to change. This count comes from the filings, each linked to sec.gov from the moves record, and the last section says what a true rate would need.

What the record counts, and from when

Form 8-K Item 5.02 is where a company reports that its principal financial officer "retires, resigns or is terminated from that position" (paragraph (b)) or that it has appointed a new one (paragraph (c)). General Instruction B.1 gives four business days from the event. The record's filings desk reads the current-filings feed for 8-Ks that carry Item 5.02, drafts a record for each one that concerns the CFO seat, and a second reader re-checks the draft against the filing before it publishes.

Each record is one filing. It names the person or people the filing names, the title as printed, the effective date as printed and the filing date. The kind is the record's own convention, set out in the glossary: a transition names both the outgoing CFO and a permanent successor; an interim record names someone acting or interim; a departure names an outgoing CFO and no successor; an appointment names a new CFO and no predecessor.

The record does not publish every Item 5.02 filing it reads. A filing that describes a CFO's exit in terms such as dismissal or investigation, a merger filing that re-lists officers, and a filing in which the CFO keeps the seat are all left out or held for a person. So the count is of verified changes in the seat, and it is a floor.

The count: CFO changes per month

Every full month since the record began carried between 81 and 98 filings: 89 in June, 88 in July, 98 in August, 83 in September and 81 in October. The first ten days of November added 22.

The kinds move more than the totals. Transitions run from 22 in July to 44 in August. Interim appointments peak at 28 in July, then settle between 16 and 18 a month. Departures with no successor named were 13 in June and between 15 and 22 a month after that. Appointments with no predecessor in the filing fell from 20 in June to 13 in both September and October.

Two cautions apply to month counts. The first is the filing date. The record dates each filing by the day it reached EDGAR, not by the effective date, which can be months away. A CFO who leaves on December 31 may have been reported in August. The second is the record's age. June is the first month the record holds, and a filing made on June 1 about an event in May is counted in June.

Kinds of change: appointment, transition, interim, departure

Across all 461 filings, transitions are the largest group at 189. A transition is the plainest kind of filing to read: one 8-K says who leaves and who takes the seat. The departures and successors study asks how often a successor is named at the same time as the departure.

Interim appointments make up 100 filings. An interim record does not mean the seat is empty: the filing names the person acting in it. The interim CFOs study asks how often companies name an interim CFO and how long it takes until a permanent one is named.

The 91 departures and 81 appointments are the two halves of changes that companies reported in separate filings. A departure filed in July can be followed by an appointment filed in October, and both appear on the company's page. Counting them separately here is deliberate: each is a filing the company made, and each starts its own four business day clock.

By industry division

Move records carry no industry code of their own, so for this count the record read the EDGAR submissions file once for each of the 420 companies and took the four-digit Standard Industrial Classification code EDGAR assigns. The chart groups those codes into the classification's highest level, its divisions, in alphabetical order.

Manufacturing filers made 175 of the 461 filings. The division (SIC 20 to 39) holds pharmaceutical companies along with heavy industry, and pharmaceutical preparations alone (SIC 2834) account for 37 of the 175. Finance, insurance and real estate filers (SIC 60 to 67) made 97; 17 of those carry SIC 6221, the code EDGAR assigns to each of the 17 trusts behind the July week described below, and 16 carry 6798, real estate investment trusts. Services filers (SIC 70 to 89) made 96, and 73 of them are in major group 73, business services, which includes software. Transportation, communications and utilities made 29, retail trade 26, mining 15, wholesale trade 12, construction 5 and agriculture 1. EDGAR gives 5 filers no SIC code.

These are counts of filings by division, not shares of each division's companies. A division with many filers will show many changes for that reason alone. Turning the counts into a rate per division would need the number of filers in each division with a CFO seat, which the next section takes up.

The weekly view, and one week in July

Week to week, the record has had between 11 and 32 CFO filings in each of the 23 full weeks since June 1, with a median of 19.

The line for interim appointments is flat at 1 to 8 a week except for one week. In the week of June 29, 20 interim filings reached the record. Seventeen of them were filed on July 2 by trusts and exchange-traded funds whose sponsor is Grayscale Investments Sponsors, LLC, each reporting the same change of Chief Financial Officer at the sponsor. Each trust is a separate SEC registrant and each made its own 8-K, so the record holds 17 filings for what was one decision at the sponsor.

That week is the clearest case of something a reader of any CFO count should expect: registrants that share officers, as a sponsor's trusts do, can turn one change into several filings. The record counts filings because filings are what it can verify. Counting companies instead, the 461 filings come from 420 filers.

The seats side

The record also keeps a roster: for each company it covers, the officer who signed the latest 10-K as principal financial officer, with the title as printed. The roster holds 831 seats. Of those companies, 339 have at least one Item 5.02 CFO filing in the moves record dated after the 10-K the roster seat comes from.

That figure is not a turnover rate either. The roster is not a random sample of filers: 368 of the 420 companies with a move in this window also have a roster seat, so it is weighted toward companies that have had a change. It does show how fast a 10-K signature goes out of date. For 339 companies the person who signed the last annual report may no longer be the person in the seat, and the company's page on the record shows both the signature and the later filing.

CFO changes next to the other disclosures

The record also holds the auditor changes and non-reliance filings companies made in the same months, which lets a reader see where a CFO filing sits among a company's other 8-Ks. From June 1 to November 10, 2026, 148 companies filed an Item 4.01 auditor change on the record, and 16 of them also have a CFO filing in the moves record. Twenty-five companies filed an Item 4.02 non-reliance report in the window, and 4 of them also have a CFO filing.

Those overlaps are counts of companies, not a finding about cause. The record links neither kind of filing to the other, and the filings rarely do either. They are a reading list: the 16 and the 4 companies are the ones where the finance function changed in more than one way in the same months, and each company's page shows the filings in date order.

Why the record gives no turnover rate

A turnover rate is changes divided by seats, over a period. The record can supply the numerator for a defined window: 461 verified filings from 420 companies between June 1 and November 10, 2026. It cannot supply the denominator yet. It would need the number of SEC registrants that had a CFO seat on June 1, and whether each was still a reporting company on November 10. EDGAR holds the filers, but not a field that says a company has a principal financial officer, and many registrants, such as trusts and shell companies, file reports without a CFO of their own.

There is a second gap. The record's numerator is a floor, because filings held for a person and filings the desk has not yet read are not in it, and because a company that never files the 8-K is invisible to it. A rate built on a floor and an estimated denominator would look more exact than it is. So the record publishes counts and says what they cover.

What a rate would need, in order: a fixed panel of companies, such as the S&P 500 at a stated date; a seat holder for each at the start of the window, from the roster; and every Item 5.02 filing for those companies in the window, which the record holds. The roster's S&P 500 seats are the first step. When the record has a full year of filings for that panel, it can publish a rate with its base.

Method, data download and update schedule

How the counts were made:

• Coverage. Verified CFO records from Form 8-K Item 5.02 filings filed from June 1 to November 10, 2026: 461 records. Each was drafted from its filing and re-checked against it by the second reader. Filings held for a person, and filings not yet read, are not counted.
• Month. The month the filing reached EDGAR, from the record's filed field.
• Kind. The record's event field: transition, interim, departure or appointment, under the conventions in the glossary.
• Division. The SIC code in the company's EDGAR submissions file, read once per company on November 10, 2026 (UTC), grouped into the ten SIC divisions; no code is not established.
• Weeks. Monday to Sunday. The partial week from November 9 is left out of the weekly chart.
• Seats. Roster companies matched to moves by CIK; a move counts when its filing date is after the roster seat's 10-K filing date.
• Recomputing. Every figure is computed by scripts/articles/compute.mjs in the site's code and saved with the chart data. The rows are in the open data, and the month totals are on CFO moves in 2026 and in the monthly reports. This article is updated as the record grows.