The VP Sales Job Market in 2026: Weekly Data from 1,349 Postings

The Current Market

Right now, as of January 30, 2026, we're tracking 109 active VP Sales, CRO, and executive sales leadership roles. That number alone doesn't tell you much. The context does.

The CRO Report tracks 1,349+ executive sales postings weekly. In 2026, VP Sales remains the most in-demand title, representing 46% of all senior sales leadership openings.

December was brutal. The holiday lull dropped active postings to 66 roles. That's the lowest we'd seen in our tracking window. Companies weren't hiring, weren't posting, weren't doing much of anything on the talent front. Normal seasonal behavior, but still a grim number to stare at for a few weeks.

Then January happened.

The week of January 7, the market snapped back to 118 active roles. A 79% jump in a single week. By January 22, we hit 164, which is the largest active count in recent memory and matches the 2022 all-time high of 162. Last week the count held at 164, up 20% from 137 the week prior. Q1 budgets unlocked, headcount plans got approved, and talent acquisition teams started executing.

This week's drop to 109 is worth watching. Some of it is natural churn as roles fill. Some may be a brief pause after the January surge. We'll know more in the next couple of weeks.

90-day trend: Executive sales roles tracked weekly by The CRO Report. The December dip and January surge are clearly visible.

The 5-Year View

Pull back the lens and the story gets more interesting.

The 2022 peak of 162 active openings was the high-water mark for executive sales hiring. That was the tail end of the zero-interest-rate hiring spree. Every Series B was building out a sales org. Demand for VP Sales leaders was at its loudest.

Then the contraction hit. 2023 brought layoffs, budget freezes, and a market correction that crushed hiring across the board. The sales leadership market didn't escape it. We saw steady declines through 2023 and into 2024, with the market settling into a 100-110 range through most of 2025. Not terrible, not great. Just flat.

The January 2026 surge that pushed us to 164 is significant because it's the first time we've touched 2022 levels. Whether that holds, or whether it was a compressed Q1 budget dump that fades, is the question worth tracking.

What the long view does confirm: the executive sales hiring market is cyclical. It follows macro sentiment, funding cycles, and fiscal year planning. If you're looking for a VP Sales or CRO role, timing matters more than most people acknowledge.

Complete history: Executive sales market trends since tracking began. The 2022 peak, the contraction, and the 2026 rebound are all visible.

Where the Roles Are

We tag every posting by industry. Here's what 1,349 postings have looked like across sectors.

Healthcare and tech are essentially tied at the top. That's not new, but the Healthcare number has been quietly climbing. Aging population, digital health expansion, and a wave of health-tech companies all need revenue leaders who understand complex sales cycles and compliance-heavy environments. If you've spent your career in pure SaaS and haven't considered healthcare adjacencies, you're leaving options on the table.

Education at 626 is the surprise of the dataset. EdTech funding has been lumpy, but the sector keeps posting VP Sales roles. Government at 423 is steady, driven by GovTech vendors and defense-adjacent companies that need enterprise sales leadership with clearance experience or public-sector fluency.

The seniority mix across all postings skews heavily toward VP-level titles at roughly 89% of roles. C-level positions (CRO, CSO) make up about 8%, and SVP roles account for around 3%. If you're a VP looking to jump to CRO, the math is clear: there just aren't that many seats.

Remote vs. On-Site

As of this week, 43.9% of active executive sales roles are listed as remote. That's been a fairly stable number through 2025, hovering in the 40-50% range most weeks. Some weeks have pushed past 60%.

The comp gap between remote and on-site is real but not as dramatic as you might expect. Remote roles are posting salary ranges of $151,533 to $217,341, while on-site roles (which tend to concentrate in expensive metros) range from $169,077 to $250,238. Call it roughly a 14% premium for on-site when you compare the high ends.

But that comparison is noisy. On-site roles disproportionately sit in New York, San Francisco, and Boston, where cost of living pushes compensation up regardless of remote policy. A remote role at a Series C company in healthcare-tech might pay just as well as an on-site role at a smaller firm in a secondary market. Context always beats averages.

The trend line is toward more remote flexibility. That's been true since 2020 and nothing we see in the data suggests it's reversing. If anything, companies that insist on fully on-site for a VP Sales role are narrowing their candidate pool at a time when talent is already hard to find. Browse the latest remote openings on our jobs board to see what's available.

Salary Transparency Trends

Across the full dataset, 54.8% of postings disclose some form of compensation range. That's up meaningfully from where we started tracking. Some recent weeks have hit 72.3% disclosure.

Here's the weekly data.

The upward trend is real, though it's not linear. State transparency laws in Colorado, New York, California, and Washington continue to push disclosure rates up. Companies posting in those states don't have a choice. But we're also seeing voluntary disclosure increase among companies in states that don't require it. That's a talent market signal: employers know that candidates skip postings without comp data.

For candidates, the practical takeaway is simple. If a company won't disclose a range for a VP Sales role, you're probably looking at below-market comp or a compensation structure that's unusually variable. Companies that feel confident in their offer put it in the posting. Our salary benchmarks can help you calibrate expectations by title, location, and company stage.

The Compensation Trend

Average maximum base compensation across tracked postings has moved from $252,819 in week 48 of 2025 to $227,177 in the most recent partial week. That's a 10.1% decline over roughly nine weeks.

Is this a real market decline? Maybe. But probably not entirely.

A few factors are muddying the numbers. First, the holiday-week data (W00, with just 22 roles) dragged the average down significantly. Small sample sizes produce volatile averages. Second, the mix of roles matters enormously. A week heavy on enterprise SaaS CRO roles in San Francisco will show a very different average than a week heavy on VP Sales roles at mid-market healthcare companies. The underlying comp for equivalent roles hasn't dropped the way the topline number suggests.

That said, a couple of patterns are worth noting. The $310,773 average in W51 was the outlier on the high side, likely driven by a cluster of large-enterprise or late-stage postings that week. The more recent weeks in the $227K-$254K range are closer to what we'd consider a stable baseline for this role tier. You can see how compensation varies dramatically by location in our detailed salary analysis.

What This Means

Methodology

Frequently Asked Questions