Fractional CFOs in SEC Filings: Statistics (2026)

Last updated: October 2026. Corpus frozen 26 October 2026. Covers filings from 1 January 2015 to 26 October 2026.

The fractional CFO market has no official statistics. There is no occupational code for it, no regulator counts it, and the figures in circulation come from marketplaces and firms that sell the service. This page uses a source that none of them control: the filings US companies make with the Securities and Exchange Commission. When a public company, a Regulation A issuer or a crowdfunded startup relies on a fractional, part-time or outsourced CFO, it often has to say so, name the person and, in some cases, file the contract.

The filings are permanent, public and searchable, so every number below can be recounted. For survey and market figures from other sources (client counts, pay surveys, interim day rates), see the companion page, Fractional CFO Statistics. The coverage is American and skews toward small issuers, which the Limitations section spells out.

At a glance

The market changed its name

In 2015, 5% of SEC filings describing an external CFO used the word "fractional". In 2026 it is 59%. Share of filings mentioning a fractional, part-time, outsourced, virtual, contract or consulting CFO that use "fractional CFO" or "fractional chief financial officer". 184 such filings in 2015, 541 in 2025, 467 in 2026 to 26 October. A filing can use several terms. (EDGAR full-text search)

"Fractional" overtook "part-time" in 2022 and "outsourced" in 2023. "Part-time" fell from 46% of these filings to 14%, and "contract" or "consulting CFO" from 34% to 5%. "Virtual CFO" peaked at 6% in 2022 and has nearly disappeared. "CFO as a service" appears in no filing at all over the period.

Among companies that actually use one, the word flipped completely. In 2015, all 12 companies whose filings describe their own external CFO used "part-time" (one also used "outsourced"), and none used "fractional". In 2026, 34 of the 43 use "fractional", 7 "part-time" and 2 "outsourced". The function did not change much; the name did, and it changed fastest among the companies paying for it.

How much the term is used

Documents mentioning a "fractional CFO" went from 35 in 2019 to 251 in 2025, and 305 in 2026 to 26 October. Before 2019 the count stayed between 4 and 11 a year. These are documents (a filing and its exhibits count separately); by filing, the count goes from 34 in 2019 to 230 in 2025 and 274 in 2026, across 12, 73 and 127 distinct companies. (EDGAR full-text search)

Over the same period, mentions of an interim CFO grew 60%. Documents mentioning an "interim CFO" or "interim chief financial officer" went from 5,475 in 2015 to 8,842 in 2025. Interim CFOs are mostly full-time stand-ins between two permanent hires, and they are the control series on this page: the growth of "fractional" is not a general rise in CFO turnover being reported.

How many companies disclose using one

Most mentions are not companies hiring a fractional CFO. They are biographies: a director or a new full-time CFO described as having worked as a fractional CFO elsewhere. We classified every document and audited the classification by hand (see Method), so the counts below are of the filer itself using an external CFO.

43 companies disclosed using an external CFO in 2026 to 26 October, against 12 in 2015 and 24 in 2025. Companies with at least one document whose text states that the filer engaged, appointed, relies on or pays a fractional, part-time or outsourced CFO. This is a lower bound: the rule that produces it was right on 20 of 20 hand-checked documents, but it misses about a third of the cases it cannot classify.

Allowing for what the rules miss, the number of documents describing a company's own external CFO rose from about 45 a year (2015-2019) to about 140 (2025 and 2026). Estimated 137 documents in 2025 (95% range 89 to 219) and 143 in 2026 to 26 October (97 to 215), redressed from the hand audit by stratum. The ranges are wide because the audit is small; the direction is not in doubt.

23 companies filed a document signed or certified by an officer titled "fractional CFO" in 2026. Before 2018 there were none. Sarbanes-Oxley certifications ("I, …, Fractional Chief Financial Officer, certify that…"), 10-K signature pages and the signature blocks of crowdfunding filings. 1 a year from 2018 to 2021, 3 in 2022, 6 in 2024, 12 in 2025. This is the strictest measure on the page: the title is the one the company files under. (Better For You Wellness, 10-Q certification; Trans American Aquaculture, 10-Q certification; Bomb Enterprises, Form C/A)

The 2026 rise comes from small companies. Of the 43 companies in 2026, 17 are crowdfunding issuers (Regulation CF, Form C and its updates) and 11 announced the engagement in an 8-K. Crowdfunded startups are the closest this corpus gets to the typical fractional CFO client.

"Fractional CFO" has become a line on public-company leadership résumés. Companies whose filings include the biography of an officer or director with fractional CFO experience: 2 in 2019, 13 in 2022, 28 in 2023, 32 in 2025 and 52 in 2026 to 26 October.

What the filings say about how it works

Some companies convert their full-time CFO into a fractional one. urban-gro: "Mr. Akright will serve as a fractional Chief Financial Officer to the Company", paid "$185 per hour", with severance "for transitioning from full-time employment with the Company to the consulting role." (urban-gro, 8-K, February 2025) ReShape Lifesciences reduced its CFO's role "to a fractional CFO, working part time on standard activities and addition for special projects as needed for an hourly rate of $125" (S-4/A, 2025).

Others use the engagement as a trial for a permanent hire. Lulu's Fashion Lounge appointed a fractional CFO through Business Talent Group in October 2025 for a fixed $170,000 over "approximately 60 working days" (8-K and exhibit 10.1), and announced in February 2026 that she would become its permanent CFO, saying it had worked with her "in a fractional capacity".

The engagement is often sized in hours or days, not in a job title. ProPhase Labs: "25 hours of time per month at the rate of $10,000 per month, on a month-to-month basis" (8-K, August 2025). Anebulo Pharmaceuticals' part-time CFO "dedicates approximately 25% of his business time" to the company, at "$400 per hour" (DEF 14A, 2025).

What filed agreements pay

Fees disclosed in filings, one observation per engagement, coded by hand from the text. Fees for other officers, full-time salaries and amounts in other currencies are excluded. These are small US issuers, mostly microcaps and pre-revenue companies.

Hourly rates run from $125 to $400, with a median of $200 (7 agreements, 2020 to 2025). $125 (ReShape, 2023), $175 (Cloudhands, 2025), $185 (urban-gro, 2025), $200 (Veritransfer, 2020, capped at 30 hours a month), $205 (Pacific Health Care Organization through NOW CFO, 2024), $250 (nDivision through Harris & Dickey, 2022), $400 (Anebulo, 2023).

Monthly fees run from $1,250 to $15,000, with a median of $7,500 (18 agreements, 2018 to 2026). The median is $5,000 across the 9 agreements dated 2022 or earlier, and $11,000 across the 6 dated 2025 or 2026. Agreements described as "fractional" have a median of $9,000 (6), against lower figures for "part-time" ones, which are also older on average.

Three companies repriced the same engagement upward, by 50% to 150%. Brightline Interactive, from a fixed $6,000 to $15,000 a month in June 2026 (8-K exhibit 10.1); Ridepair, from $5,000 to $10,000 a month in 2025 (1-A/A); Clean Vision, from $5,000 to $7,500 in 2023.

For comparison, platforms report hourly figures in the same range. FractionalJobs.io lists $200 to $400 per hour for fractional CFOs (February 2026), as reported on the companion page. Go Fractional reports an average rate of $191 per hour for fractional CFO roles on its job board in its 2026 report. Different population and method (a platform's listings rather than filed agreements), and the platform has a commercial interest in the number. (Go Fractional, 2026 State of Fractional Work)

Method

Source. The SEC's EDGAR full-text search, which indexes every electronic filing since 2001, queried through its public endpoint (efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index) one exact phrase at a time and one calendar year at a time, from 2015 to 26 October 2026. Each matched document was then retrieved from the EDGAR archive (sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…) within the SEC's fair-access limit.

Frozen vocabulary. Fourteen phrases, fixed before the first count and kept unchanged between runs so the vocabulary shares stay comparable: fractional CFO, fractional chief financial officer, part-time CFO, part-time chief financial officer, outsourced CFO, outsourced chief financial officer, virtual CFO, virtual chief financial officer, CFO as a service, contract CFO, consulting CFO, CFO services, interim CFO and interim chief financial officer. "CFO services" is counted but left out of the vocabulary shares, because it also matches "interim CFO services". The two interim phrases are a control series and are not part of any external-CFO count.

Phrase precision. Full-text search matches tokens, so a phrase could in principle match across punctuation. For each phrase, 12 randomly drawn documents were retrieved and searched for the exact wording: all phrases matched verbatim in 12 of 12, except "consulting CFO" (11 of 12).

Units. A filing (one accession number) can contain several documents, such as an 8-K and its exhibits. Volumes are given in documents where stated, otherwise in filings. Companies are distinct filer identifiers (CIK). Ownership forms (Forms 3, 4 and 5) are attributed to the issuer, not the person. Filings by registered investment funds (161 documents, mostly trustee biographies) are excluded from company counts.

Classification. The 3,309 documents matching a fractional, part-time or outsourced phrase were retrieved and the text around each match classified by written rules into three groups: engagement (the filer itself uses an external CFO: it engaged, appointed or pays one, relies on one, or files a certification or signature under that title), biography (a person's career elsewhere) and unclear. 187 documents with no retrievable text (scanned PDFs, images) are left out.

Hand audit. Three rounds of hand labelling on random samples: the first two (150 documents) were used to correct the rules, the third (60 documents, 20 per group, drawn after the last change) to measure them. In the final audit, 20 of 20 documents classified as engagement were engagements, 1 of 20 biographies was in fact an engagement, and 7 of 20 unclear documents were. The estimated totals apply these rates to each group, with 95% Wilson intervals. The hand labels are published with the data.

Signed title. A separate, strict measure: documents where an officer of the filer signs or certifies with the title fractional, part-time or outsourced CFO (Sarbanes-Oxley certifications, signature pages, crowdfunding signature blocks, Form D officer lists, Forms 3 and 4). 20 of 20 sampled cases were correct.

Fees. Pay passages were extracted automatically from engagement and signed-title documents, then read and coded by hand: one observation per engagement, the latest stated terms, US dollars only. Two agreements found during the audit (SeaStar, BioRestorative) were added after reading them in full.

Data. The method folder holds the phrase list, the scripts, the raw search hits, the classified documents, the hand-audit labels and the coded fees, so the counts can be rerun or re-adjudicated.

Limitations

• This is the visible part of the market. Only companies that file with the SEC appear: listed companies (mostly small caps and microcaps), Regulation A issuers and Regulation CF crowdfunding issuers. Private companies, which are most fractional CFO clients, file nothing, and none outside the United States do. The trend is informative; the levels are not a market size.
• Small issuers are over-represented by construction. A company that can afford a full-time CFO rarely needs to disclose an external one. The fees are microcap fees, not a market rate.
• Disclosure is not exhaustive. A company can use a fractional CFO without describing the arrangement in a way these phrases capture, or under a title such as "Principal Financial Officer". Counts are floors.
• Classification has error. The engagement count misses part of the unclear group, and the estimated totals carry wide intervals because the audit sample is 60 documents.
• The filer population moves. Regulation CF and Regulation A filings have grown since 2021, which raises counts independently of fractional CFO adoption. The vocabulary shares are ratios within the same filings and are not affected; the volumes are.
• 2026 is a partial year, ending 26 October.
• The fee sample is small: 7 hourly and 18 monthly agreements over eight years. The 2025-26 median rests on 6 agreements.

Figures we excluded, and why

• Job-board counts of fractional CFO openings. Most listings titled "fractional CFO" on general job boards are posted by fractional CFO firms recruiting practitioners or by staffing agencies, not by companies buying the service, and the boards' result counts cannot be reproduced. A buyer-side count from job postings is not possible with public data.
• Freelance platforms (Malt, Upwork and similar). Client projects are not public, so no count is possible.
• "Fractional work is growing X% a year." Figures of this kind come from platforms describing their own users. We report what filings show instead.
• French "DAF à temps partagé" postings. The public employment service (France Travail) returned one or two listings for the term, posted by firms recruiting consultants. Too few to report.

Sources

• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR full-text search and EDGAR archives. All counts.
• Filings quoted above, linked inline.
• Go Fractional, 2026 State of Fractional Work. Comparison figure only.

Changelog

• 2026-10-26 (first run): Corpus frozen 26 October 2026, filings from 1 January 2015. Fourteen frozen phrases, 3,309 documents classified, 60-document final hand audit, 25 fee observations coded. Next run: late January 2027, on the same phrase list.

Further reading

• Survey, pay and market figures on fractional CFOs from other primary sources: Fractional CFO Statistics
• What the shift in vocabulary means for the people selling the service: Fractional CFO vs Part-Time CFO: What Eleven Years of SEC Filings Show

Compiled by Layerz.