When a public company loses an executive, it has four business days to tell the SEC (Form 8-K, Item 5.02). Those filings pile up into something no press release ever shows: an honest census of how leaders actually leave. We parsed every one in AnalystBook's record — 6,529 departures across 6,000+ U.S. companies, mostly from 2023 through mid-2026. Three findings stood out.
1. Almost nobody is “fired” — on paper
Of the 6,490 departures whose filings state or imply a reason: 59.8% are resignations, 26.6% are retirements, and only 13.4% are terminations. Ten cite health. Read a few hundred of these filings and the pattern is unmistakable: disclosure language smooths the exit. An executive shown the door usually “resigns to pursue other opportunities”; the word “terminated” appears mainly when a company has a legal reason to be explicit (for-cause severance terms, clawbacks). So treat that 13.4% as a floor, not a rate — which is itself the finding: the filing tells you how a company wants a departure read, and the deviation from the script is the signal.
2. CEOs and CFOs leave differently
| Stated reason | CEOs (733 departures) | CFOs (731 departures) |
|---|---|---|
| Resignation | 57.3% | 71.0% |
| Retirement | 28.4% | 20.7% |
| Terminated | 14.2% | 8.2% |
Two asymmetries worth sitting with. CEOs are terminated at nearly twice the CFO rate (14.2% vs 8.2%) — when a company needs a public accountability moment, it's the chief executive who provides it. And CFOs overwhelmingly just resign (71%): the finance chief's exit is quieter, more portable, and — for anyone watching a specific company — worth more attention than it gets, because a CFO who leaves without a stated destination is one of the older red flags in fundamental research.
3. More than 1 in 4 top-officer seats are filled “for now”
Across 1,248 CEO and CFO appointments in the record, 345 — 27.6% — were interim. Succession gaps aren't the exception; they're close to the norm. When you see an interim tag on a new officer in a filing, the real question the record can help you answer is how long that company has been running on temporary leadership — and what else changed in the same window.
How we counted (and what we didn't claim)
Source: 8-K Item 5.02 filings across the 6,000+ U.S. companies in AnalystBook's record, parsed into structured events at ingest — every event links to its filing. Reasons are as stated or clearly classifiable from the filing's own text; as noted, filed language understates involuntary exits by design. The 39 departures (0.6%) with no classifiable reason are excluded from the percentages. Our coverage of these filings is concentrated from 2023 onward, so we report shares, not year-over-year trends. No sampling — this is the full record.
In the product, these events aren't a dataset — they're your feed: follow a company and its executive changes land the day they're filed, with the verbatim filing one click away. They also appear on every covered company's public intelligence page: Apple's, for one, currently shows the CEO transition from Tim Cook to John Ternus, effective September 2026, straight from the 8-K. For research purposes only; not investment advice.