The role, in detail · Updated September 2026

A day in the life of a CTO and why it looks nothing like the last one.

Q: What does a CTO do on a daily basis?

It depends almost entirely on company size. Below ten engineers a CTO typically still writes code, and published practitioner accounts put recruiting at over half the week. Between ten and twenty engineers the coding stops and the day fills with one to ones, architecture reviews and hiring loops. Past twenty engineers the day becomes executive work: planning, budget, senior hiring, board preparation and the decisions nobody below can make. In established non-technology companies the day is largely external, spent with customers, partners and analysts.

Q: Is a CTO higher than a VP of Engineering?

Not reliably. Fred Wilson's standard reference on this states that the two are often peers, that a VP Engineering can report to a CTO, and that a CTO can report to a VP Engineering, although that last arrangement is less common. The clearer distinction is ownership rather than rank: the CTO owns the technology and the technical strategy, and the VP Engineering owns the team and how it executes.

Q: Is a CTO higher than a CEO?

No. The CEO is the most senior executive and the CTO normally reports to them, although in many established enterprises the CTO reports to the CIO instead. Deloitte's 2025 survey of 622 US technology executives found 65 percent of CIOs report directly to the CEO, and among those, 34 percent have the CTO as one of their direct reports.

Q: Who earns more, a CTO or a CEO?

It depends on company size, and the answer surprises people. At publicly listed companies the CEO earns substantially more: Fortune reported in September 2026 that the typical CEO was paid roughly $2.16 million more than the typical CTO. For context, the same analysis put median total compensation for executives with technology in their title at $2.6 million, a band that also includes CIOs and chief digital officers. At startups the gap closes and often reverses. Kruze Consulting's 2026 payroll data shows seed-stage CTOs at $155,000 against CEOs at $153,000, and Series B CTOs at $238,000 against CEOs at $216,000. Founder CEOs commonly take less cash while holding more equity.

Q: What is the difference between a CTO and a CIO?

The usual split is outward versus inward. The CTO owns the technology the company sells or builds its product on. The CIO owns the internal technology estate that keeps the company running: employee systems, infrastructure, governance and vendors. KPMG's Marcus Murph, quoted by TechTarget, says there is no standard definition of the job and that technology leader titles are fluid. Where both roles exist, one may report to the other, and the boundary shifts with company size, industry and strategy.

Q: Does a CTO still write code?

Early on, yes. Later, usually not, though this may be changing. One founder CTO, Miguel Carranza of RevenueCat, stopped coding completely at around eight engineers, and his stated trigger was becoming the bottleneck for shipping rather than reaching a particular team size. Against that, LeadDev's 2026 survey of 600 engineering leaders found 37 percent doing more hands-on technical work than a year earlier, a reversal that appears to be driven by AI tooling.

Q: How much does a CTO earn?

In the United States, Salary.com put the median CTO base salary at $309,806 as of September 2026, with an interquartile range of $282,153 to $347,201. Startup cash salaries are lower: Kruze reports $155,000 at seed and $238,000 at Series B. At publicly listed companies, Fortune reported median total compensation of $2.6 million for executives with technology in their title, a band that includes CIOs and chief digital officers as well as CTOs. In the UK, Robert Walters gives a London range of £165,000 to £310,000 for 2026, while PayScale's self-reported data puts the UK median at £102,000, a gap that reflects two different populations rather than an error.

Q: How much equity does a CTO get?

A hired, non-founder CTO typically receives around 1 percent of fully diluted equity. Carta's June 2026 data puts the median initial grant for a non-founder C-level executive at venture-backed companies at 1.0 percent, and Index Ventures independently puts a Series A or B CTO at about 1 percent in the US and 0.7 percent in Europe. A founding CTO is an entirely different case, holding co-founder scale equity negotiated at formation.

Q: Do all companies have a CTO?

No. Deloitte's 2024 CIO programme survey of 211 US technology leaders found 52 percent of the organisations surveyed had a CTO, against 83 percent with a CIO or chief digital and information officer. Among publicly traded companies the CTO figure dropped to 35 percent. Note that the sample is drawn from organisations that already have senior technology leadership, so it is not a random sample of all companies.

There is no single CTO day, and anyone who describes one is describing their own company at one moment in its life. The job at eight engineers and the job at eighty share a title and almost nothing else. This guide sets out what the role actually contains, how the day changes as the company grows, and how the CTO seat differs from the VP Engineering and CIO seats it gets confused with.

Share of engineering leaders who spent MORE time on each activity than twelve months earlier. LeadDev, Engineering Leadership Report 2025, 617 respondents, fielded March 2025.

Read the short version Score yourself

Every figure on this page carries a named source and a date. Where no data exists, it says so.

52% · Of surveyed organisations have a CTO
37% · Of engineering leaders now do MORE hands-on work
8 · Engineers: when one founder CTO stopped coding
2 hrs · Median daily time developers spend with AI

Quick answer

What does a CTO actually do?

A CTO is the executive accountable for technology decisions that the business cannot easily reverse. In practice that means seven things: setting technical direction, owning architecture, hiring and keeping engineers, making delivery predictable, managing technical risk, representing the technology outside the company, and deciding what to build, buy or partner for. The day-to-day mix changes completely with company size. At under ten engineers the CTO is usually still writing code and spending a large share of the week recruiting. Past twenty engineers the coding stops, the calendar fills with people and planning, and the job becomes executive work carried out through other people.

The common misreading

The job is executive work, not senior engineering

The most common misreading of the role is that a CTO is the best engineer in the building, promoted. Camille Fournier put the corrective plainly in 2015: the CTO is an executive first and a technologist second, and the right definition is whatever strategic technical leadership the company needs at its current stage. That framing matters because it explains why the job keeps changing underneath the person doing it. The company moves through stages. The seat is redefined at each one. Nobody sends a memo.

The role, unpacked

The seven things the job actually contains

Strip out the company-specific detail and the same seven responsibilities appear in every version of the role. What changes by stage is how much of the week each one takes.

Set technical direction

Decide what gets built, what gets stopped, and what the technology is for in business terms. Roger Smith's 2003 study of the role framed this as the shift that defines a CTO: converting technical capability into competitive advantage, rather than running open-ended research.

Own the irreversible decisions

Most technical choices are cheap to change. A few are not. Bessemer calls these one-way doors, and names data store choices and how you structure DevOps and QA as two of them. The CTO exists mainly to get those right, because everyone else is too close to the current sprint to see them.

Hire and keep the engineers

At early stage this is the single largest use of the CTO's week. Pete Warden, writing as CTO of an early-stage company in 2012, logged over half his time going on recruiting. In LeadDev's 2025 survey, finding suitable candidates or the time it takes topped the list of hiring challenges for 79 percent of hiring managers.

Make delivery predictable

Evan Cooke, co-founder and former CTO of Twilio, describes building a company as generating predictability where none existed. Cadence, decision rights, roadmaps and escalation paths are the machinery for that. This is the part most technical founders resist longest.

Own technical risk

Security, reliability, data protection, key-person risk and compliance. Nobody else in the company is equipped to price these, and they only become visible when they fail. Bessemer puts the first dedicated security investment at around the fifteen to twenty engineer mark.

Represent the technology outside the company

Customers, investors, partners, auditors and the hiring market all need someone credible to talk to. Chris Swan, a long-serving enterprise CTO, described himself as a marketing CTO when asked what type he was, and his logged day was almost entirely external.

Decide build, buy or partner

Including vendors, outsourced teams and, since 2025, the AI tooling stack. This is where the money is either saved or quietly burned, and it is a decision that compounds for years.

Honest about the evidence

Where the time actually goes

An honest caveat before the numbers. I could not find a credible survey that publishes a stage-by-stage percentage breakdown of how CTOs spend their week. If you are shown one, check whose data it is before you trust it. What does exist is directional survey data on engineering leaders, and a handful of practitioners who logged their own days in public.

Read the bottom bar carefully. Coding is the only activity on the list where a large minority moved the other way: 26 percent actively cut their hands-on coding and code review time.

Over half his time on recruiting

Pete Warden, early-stage CTO, 2012

His published day contained no production coding at all, despite a tiny team and an unfinished product.

Roughly 60 percent manager time, 40 percent maker time

Gregor Ojstersek, full-time CTO, 2024

He describes the split flexing week to week with business need rather than holding steady.

Stopped coding completely at around eight engineers

Miguel Carranza, founder CTO, RevenueCat

His stated trigger was not team size but the moment he became the bottleneck for shipping features.

The part that actually changes

Four days, four stages

These are composites, assembled from the practitioner accounts cited on this page rather than from survey data. They are here to show the shape of the change, not to be copied as a schedule.

Stage one · 1 to 10 engineers · The founding CTO

Still building. Still the fastest person on the codebase. The risk is that this feels like the job for longer than it is.

07:30Triage overnight errors and the support queue, because there is no rota yet
08:30Two to three hours of uninterrupted building, the only block that survives the week
11:30Candidate call, then chasing two referrals from the last one
13:00Product decisions with the co-founder, made in a conversation rather than a document
15:00A customer call where you are also the solutions engineer
16:30Review the one other engineer's work, unblock them, write the week's priorities
19:00The architecture decision you have been deferring, made properly and written down

What to watch for: Recruiting is the real job here and it does not feel like it. Warden's account is the honest one: over half the week, at a stage when the instinct is to build.

Stage two · 10 to 20 engineers · The first management layer

Stage three · 20 to 50 engineers and beyond · The executive

Stage four · Established company · The external-facing CTO

The 2002 framework

Four kinds of CTO, named in 2002 and still accurate

Tom Berray, with Raj Sampath, set out four models in a 2002 Cabot Consultants paper. Werner Vogels built on them as Amazon CTO in 2007. They remain the clearest explanation of why two people with the same title do completely different jobs.

Infrastructure ManagerRuns the line IT function: operations, applications, security. Usually reports to the CIO and does not set how technology is used. Common in companies where technology supports the business rather than being the business.
Big ThinkerAn internally facing strategist assessing how technology could change the business model. Works through influence with a very small team or none at all. Berray describes it as a low-cost addition to the organisation that can still deliver a high payoff.
Technology Visionary and Operations ManagerSets the vision and runs the organisation that delivers it. Typical of technology-led companies, reporting directly to the CEO. This is the model most startup founders mean when they say CTO.
External-facing TechnologistOutward facing, shaping products for customers and tracking potentially disruptive technology. Typically a group of roughly ten to fifty people covering research, technology transfer and intellectual property, reporting to the CEO or COO.

The practical use of this list is in hiring. My own view, having watched a number of these go wrong, is that most failed CTO hires are a mismatch of model rather than a mismatch of talent. A Big Thinker dropped into an Infrastructure Manager seat will leave within the year, and so will the reverse.

Three titles, three jobs

CTO versus VP Engineering versus CIO

These three get used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. The honest summary is that the CTO title describes a role shape, not a rank.

	CTO	VP Engineering	CIO
Owns	The technology and the technical strategy	The team and how it executes	The internal IT estate that runs the company
Points	Outward and forward: product, customers, market, what is coming	Inward and now: delivery, performance, process, retention	Inward: employee systems, infrastructure, vendors, governance
Measured on	Whether the technical bets were right	Whether the team ships predictably and stays	Availability, cost, risk and compliance
Reports to	Usually the CEO in product companies, often the CIO in enterprises	The CTO, or the CEO directly	The CEO in 65 percent of cases per Deloitte 2025, otherwise the CFO or COO

Fred Wilson's 2011 piece remains the standard reference and he is blunt about it: the CTO and VP Engineering are often peers, either can report to the other, and both configurations occur in real companies. He calls them yin and yang, and warns that one person rarely does both well. On the CIO boundary, KPMG's Marcus Murph, quoted by TechTarget, says plainly that there is no standard definition of the job and that titles for technology leaders are fluid.

The questions everyone actually asks

Pay and hierarchy, with the actual numbers

These questions dominate what people search for around the role, and most articles dodge them. Here are the figures with their sources and dates attached, including where the sources disagree.

$155k / $196k / $238k

US startup CTO cash salary: seed, Series A, Series B

Kruze Consulting's 2026 C-suite guide, drawn from anonymised payroll records of its US venture-backed clients, updated August 2026. Cash only: it excludes equity.

$309,806

US CTO median base salary, broad market

Salary.com benchmark effective 1 September 2026. The interquartile range runs $282,153 to $347,201. San Francisco sits far higher, at a $386,396 median on the same methodology effective 1 August 2026.

$2.6m

Median total pay for executives with technology in the title

Fortune, September 2026, reporting analysis by C-Suite Comp on publicly listed companies. This band covers CTOs, CIOs and chief digital officers together, and it rose 45.4 percent between 2021 and 2025 against 17.2 percent for CEOs. Within the same dataset the typical CEO was paid about $2.16 million more than the typical CTO.

1.0%

Median equity grant for a hired, non-founder C-level executive

Carta, June 2026, venture-backed companies. Index Ventures independently puts a Series A or B CTO at about 1 percent in the US and 0.7 percent in Europe. A founding CTO is a different category entirely.

2025 to 2026

What AI actually changed about the job

Two years of survey data now exist, and it does not say what the marketing says. The most interesting finding is that the oldest rule about the role may be reversing.

37%

Of engineering leaders are doing MORE hands-on technical work

LeadDev, Engineering Leadership Report 2026, 600 leaders, published September 2026. This cuts against fifteen years of consensus that seniority means less code. Roughly one in three managers in the same survey are considering a return to individual contributor work.

90%

AI adoption among software development professionals

DORA, State of AI-assisted Software Development, September 2025, nearly 5,000 respondents. Median use is two hours a day. DORA's central claim is that AI is an amplifier: it magnifies whatever strengths and weaknesses the organisation already had.

35-40% vs 10%

Productivity gain on greenfield work versus complex legacy code

Stanford research cited in DORA's May 2026 ROI report. This is the number that should shape a CTO's AI strategy, because it means the return depends on the codebase, not the tool. The same report describes a J-curve: a temporary dip before any gain arrives.

3.1%

Of developers highly trust AI output

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, over 49,000 responses from 177 countries. 84 percent use or plan to use AI tools, but 66 percent cite solutions that are almost right as their top frustration, and 45.2 percent say debugging AI-generated code takes longer than writing it.

84%

Of engineering leaders think AI makes it harder for juniors to enter the profession

LeadDev 2026. This makes the talent pipeline a CTO problem rather than a recruiting problem. GitHub's Octoverse reported nearly 80 percent of new developers on GitHub using Copilot within their first week, so the entry path itself has changed.

Comprehension debt

The new failure mode, named by Bessemer in 2026

Bessemer's argument is that the risk in agentic development is not code quality but loss of human understanding of the system, and that engineers should be able to explain their systems two or three layers deep. For a CTO this is a governance question, not a tooling one.

One caution on reading any of this. DORA finds over 80 percent of individuals reporting productivity gains, while LeadDev's 2025 survey found 60 percent of leaders did not believe AI had significantly improved team productivity. Both are credible. They measure different things, and the gap between felt individual speed and observed team output is itself the thing a CTO has to manage.

Run this quarterly

The drift checklist

CTOs rarely fail suddenly. They drift, because the company changed stage and the job description in their head did not. Evan Cooke and Marty Abbott have both written on the failure modes, and they overlap on about half of them. Run this list quarterly.

You are still the fastest route to shipping a feature. You are now the bottleneck, which is the trigger Miguel Carranza named when he stopped coding.
You cannot state this quarter's technical priorities in business terms. Abbott puts lack of business acumen first among the reasons technology executives fail.
Your calendar is all operational firefighting and none of it is next year. Abbott calls this being trapped in today.
You say no more often than you propose an alternative. Cooke names this as a failure mode specifically for CTOs under commercial pressure.
Your last two senior hires were not really yours. Cooke names poor senior hiring decisions as one of his five failure modes.
You have the title but no direct reports. Camille Fournier's warning is that it is incredibly difficult to stay effective as an executive with no reporting power, and this failure does not look like failure from outside.
You have no peer relationships with the other executives. Cooke identifies too few peer relationships as a root cause rather than a symptom.
You have not asked anyone for feedback this quarter. CTO Craft's 2023 survey found just over a third of leaders ask for regular feedback and one in five do not.

Score yourself properly

Stay on top of the seat

Questions

Frequently asked questions

What does a CTO do?

A CTO is the executive accountable for a company's technology decisions, particularly the ones that are expensive to reverse. The role covers seven areas: setting technical direction, owning architecture, hiring and retaining engineers, making delivery predictable, managing technical risk, representing the technology to customers and investors, and deciding what to build, buy or partner for. How the week divides across those seven changes completely as the company grows.

What does a CTO do on a daily basis?

Is a CTO higher than a VP of Engineering?

Is a CTO higher than a CEO?

Who earns more, a CTO or a CEO?

What is the difference between a CTO and a CIO?

Does a CTO still write code?

How much does a CTO earn?

How much equity does a CTO get?

Do all companies have a CTO?

Go deeper

Where to go next

This page describes the seat. These three help you do something about it.

Self-assessment

CTO Gap Assessment

Score yourself across 51 responsibilities and eight themes. If the drift checklist on this page landed, this is the longer version.

Start the assessment

The book

The First-Time CTO Survival Guide

A practical playbook for engineers stepping into the seat for the first time, written for the stage-two problems above.

See the guide

The other option

What is a fractional CTO?

Costs, scope and when a part-time executive is the right answer instead of a full-time hire.

Read the buyer guide

Sources

References and further reading

The Chief Technology Officer: Strategic Responsibilities and Relationships · Roger D. Smith, Research-Technology Management, 46(4), 28-36, 2003
The academic account of the shift from research director to business executive. Still the clearest statement of what makes the seat strategic.
The Role of the CTO: Four Models for Success · Tom Berray and Raj Sampath, Cabot Consultants, April 2002
The origin of the four models. A consulting white paper rather than a peer-reviewed article, and widely cited for good reason.
The Chief Technology Officer and Organizational Power and Influence · John W. Medcof and Haniyeh Yousofpourfard, IAMOT 2006 conference paper
Argues that technical expertise alone does not buy a CTO a place in the decision core. Adapts Finkelstein's four power bases to the role.
The Different CTO Roles · Werner Vogels, All Things Distributed, July 2007
Amazon's CTO applying the Berray models, and the reason most people have encountered them.
On the role of CTO · Camille Fournier, Elided Branches, February 2015
The corrective essay. Executive first, technologist second, and a warning about holding the title without authority.
VP Engineering vs CTO · Fred Wilson, AVC, October 2011
The standard reference on the split, and honest that the reporting line runs both ways in practice.
A day in the life of a CTO · Pete Warden, June 2012
An early-stage CTO logging his actual day. Over half the time on recruiting, and no production coding in it.
A day in the life of a CTO · Chris Swan, March 2017
The enterprise counterpart to Warden. Almost entirely external, and a useful corrective to the startup framing.
This is How Effective CTOs Embrace Change · Evan Cooke, First Round Review, 2015
Three careers in a few years: engineer, manager, executive. The best stage-framed account of how the role fails.
Scaling your engineering team from one to 50 and beyond · Bessemer Venture Partners, July 2024
Stage thresholds and one-way doors, plus the people versus architecture fork at twenty to fifty engineers.
Inside AI-pilled engineering teams · Bessemer Venture Partners, June 2026
Where comprehension debt is named. Percentages are Bessemer-reported with no published methodology, so treat them as directional.
State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025 · DORA and Google Cloud, September 2025
Nearly 5,000 respondents. The amplifier thesis, and the adoption and trust figures used on this page.
The ROI of AI-assisted Software Development · DORA and Google Cloud, May 2026
The greenfield versus legacy productivity split and the J-curve. The most directly useful AI research for a CTO.
Developer Survey 2025: AI · Stack Overflow, 2025
Over 49,000 responses from 177 countries. Adoption is high and trust is low, and the two moved in opposite directions.
The Engineering Leadership Report 2026 · LeadDev, September 2026
600 engineering leaders. The source for leaders doing more hands-on work and for the junior pipeline concern.
The Engineering Leadership Report 2025 · LeadDev, 2025
617 respondents, fielded March 2025. The source for the time-shift chart on this page.
Tech Exec Survey · Deloitte, released November 2025
622 US technology leaders. The reporting-line data, including the 34 percent of CEO-reporting CIOs who have the CTO beneath them.
Startup C-Suite Salary Guide 2026 · Kruze Consulting, updated August 2026
Anonymised payroll data rather than self-reporting, which is why the CEO versus CTO reversal is credible. Cash only.
Executive Equity Grant Sizes: PE vs VC · Carta, June 2026
The 1 percent median. Carta reports a C-level band rather than a CTO-specific figure, so read it as the executive median.
What does a CTO actually do? · James Cannan
Eight responsibility clusters drawn from over 100 real job descriptions. The role map that sits underneath this article.
What is a fractional CTO? · James Cannan
If you have read this and concluded you need the seat but not forty hours a week of it.

The job changed underneath you. Nobody sent a memo.

Most CTOs do not fail. They keep doing the previous stage's job well while the company needs the next one. The fix starts with an honest look at which stage you are actually in.

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Reference guide · Updated September 2026 · Every figure sourced