Note: This article was originally published November 15, 2024. It has been updated to include current benchmarks for tenure and next role as of April 2025.
The Chief of Staff role is interesting because of how much variance there is in what the title means from company to company (or even department to department).
Is a Chief of Staff a fancy title for a super Executive Assistant? Or is a Chief of Staff—emphasis on Chief—a bona fide executive role and de facto member of the C-suite?
The answer is that it depends on a number of forces. This lack of consistency across companies makes compensation philosophy for the Chief of Staff role quite tricky.
Let’s take a look at some benchmarks from Pave’s dataset to understand more.
What is a Chief of Staff?
A Chief of Staff is a senior leadership role that advises and supports the CEO and C-suite of an organization.
What are the actual responsibilities of a Chief of Staff? The answer can vary greatly depending on a company’s stage.
At small or early-stage companies, Chiefs of Staff tend to be more hands-on and operational. They often wear multiple hats, coordinating between different teams and functions to ensure alignment and communication. They may act as a direct extension of the CEO, and serve as the CEO's proxy in certain meetings and decision-making processes.
At larger organizations, however, the role tends to become more specialized and formal. Chiefs of Staff at large or mature companies focus more on strategy, complex stakeholder management, and high-level coordination. They may function more as strategic advisors to the executives they support, which are often C-suite members, not just CEOs.
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Chief of Staff vs BizOps: What’s the Difference?
When people are looking for compensation advice for a Chief of Staff, I usually ask them about the intended scope and responsibility of the target hire. Usually, the answer tends to have overlap with the Business Operations (BizOps) job family.
To illustrate this point, here’s a brief description of the Business Operations job family: “Optimizes business processes and workflows to improve organizational efficiency and align with strategic goals.”
How do salary benchmarks compare between Chiefs of Staff and the BizOps job ladder in Pave’s dataset? Let’s take a look at the benchmarks.
Chief of Staff Compensation Benchmarks
We analyzed the median real-time salary benchmarks from 3,300+ Pave customers and 11k+ incumbent datapoints (all in the USA). These benchmarks are across all company stages, so the findings should be taken with a grain of salt. When performing an actual pricing exercise, make sure to choose a peer group relevant to your company’s stage.
In general, there’s a roughly 15% +/- 5% premium for Chiefs of Staff over Business Operations when benchmarks are normalized by level.
As an additional reminder, the scope of responsibility and role definition heavily influences the ideal premium (or lack thereof).
Chief of Staff Tenure
Is Chief of Staff a permanent position, or is it expected to end after a semi-defined term? Let’s look at the market benchmarks for Chief of Staff tenure by company stage.
We analyzed the median tenures for 2,220 Chief of Staff employees in Pave’s dataset. Tenures are measured as the number of years in a job title that contains Chief of Staff from the start date of the job until the date an employee left the company as Chief of Staff or moved into a different role as the company.
Median Chief of Staff Tenure by Company Stage
The median tenure for a Chief of Staff increases by company stage. This may perhaps be a derivative of increased company stability and decreased role scope thrash for Chiefs of Staff at later stage companies. This said, for early and growth stage startups, the median tenure tends to be ~2.5 years.
What comes next for Chiefs of Staff?
What job does a Chief of Staff take on after their tenure ends? Let’s take a look at the most common next job for a Chief of Staff by examining 1,394 former Chiefs of Staff in Pave’s dataset who either left their company or changed roles.
The first callout is that 66% of Chiefs of Staff don’t actually find a next role, but instead leave the company. Note that 52% of the time, these Chiefs of Staff leave once their tenure eclipses the two year mark.
What Comes After the “Chief of Staff” Title
For former Chiefs of Staff who do take a new position, they’re most likely to end up in Business Operations or Sales. Here are the loosely defined most common titles for those next roles:
- Chief Operating Officer
- VP/Director/Head of Operations
- Head of Product/Product Manager
- Head/VP of Growth
- Revenue Strategy/Operations
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