Executive security spending jumped again this year. Read what the money actually buys.
Last year, 35% of S&P 500 companies paid for their CEO’s personal security. This year it’s 54%.
For executives below the CEO, the median disclosed spend went from about $10,000 to $32,000. The number of those executives with more than $100,000 of protection on the books went from 18 to 57.
Now read the list of what that money buys: digital protection, cybersecurity monitoring, online privacy services, personal data removal, home network monitoring, residential security systems, secure transportation.
Read it twice.
There is nothing on that list that changes what you do in the ninety seconds before any of it helps you.
The numbers, and where they come from
Pay Governance published its review of this year’s proxy disclosures on August 27, 2026. The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance reprinted it on September 15. Both are linked at the bottom.
The short version: companies raised the share of CEOs they protect by more than half in a single year. Coverage for other named executives went from under 20% two years ago to roughly 47% now. The median CEO spend rose about 14%. Twenty-nine companies disclosed more than half a million dollars on one executive.
Every sector reviewed went up.
I’m not going to argue with any of it. A line item for your safety is overdue, and it’s cheap next to what your board is actually worried about.
The question is what got bought.
A detail covers a schedule. Threats don’t keep one.
I’ve spent 25+ years in law enforcement, and I’m still working. Before that I spent ten years in the Marine Corps, most of it as a primary marksmanship instructor. Over that career I’ve been in more than 600 fights. I’ve been shot at. I’ve been stalked. I’ve had someone put both hands on my weapon and try to take it.
None of that happened on a schedule anybody planned around.
Here is what a protective detail is actually good at. It controls the predictable. The office, the scheduled car, the hotel your assistant booked, the conference where your name is on a program. It deters, and it displaces — a person doing surveillance on you sees the detail and goes looking for a softer window.
That’s the job. That’s also the problem, because there is always a softer window and it has your name on it.
The 5:40 AM drive to the gym you make by yourself, because it would be ridiculous to wake a driver for it.
Saturday at the hardware store in your own neighborhood.
School pickup, in the same line, at the same time, three days a week.
The field site outside Greeley where you’re the only person from corporate and the nearest deputy is twenty minutes out on a county road.
The garage under your own building at 9 PM, after the board dinner ran long, because the detail released at seven and you told them to.
That’s not a gap in your security program. That’s most of your week.
The person most likely to hurt you was on your payroll
Ask a corporate security director what keeps them up and you won’t hear “stranger.” You’ll hear about the employee who got walked out sixty days ago.
That person knows what you drive. They know your plate. They know which spot is yours, what time you get in, and which door you use. They know your assistant’s name and how to sound normal on the phone to her. If they came to the holiday party, they know your street. If they follow your family on anything public, they know your spouse’s office and your kid’s school.
No amount of home network monitoring touches any of that. Data removal services are worth buying, and they don’t retract what somebody already learned while they worked for you.
Here is the part executives don’t want to hear.
I’ve spent years as a field training officer. The job is to evaluate whether someone is fit for the work and to say so out loud. One of the officers I trained came in with corrections experience. He was qualified. He checked out.
He later walked a murder suspect straight out the employee entrance.
We have a saying in law enforcement: you can’t make this crap up.
I don’t know what was used on him, and I’m not going to guess in public. What I know is that he was vetted, he was trained, and I was the one who trained him.
That’s the point. Your read on people is probably good. It was good on the day you made it. What turns someone isn’t visible at the interview — it happens later, in their life, out of your sight.
You cannot spend your way out of being known, and you cannot screen your way out of it either. You can only be ready.
Five things to do this week
None of this requires a budget approval.
1. Write the gap list. Take a normal week, hour by hour, and mark every block where nobody is covering you. Not your worst week — your normal one. Most people who do this honestly are surprised by how much of the week is entirely on them. That list is your actual exposure, and it’s the only honest starting point.
2. War-game the terminated employee. Twenty minutes with a pen. Who left in the last ninety days on bad terms? Write down what they know: car, plate, parking spot, arrival time, gym, route home, street, spouse’s workplace, kids’ school. Then look at which of those you can change this month and change one.
3. Fix your two chokepoints. The walk to your car, and the walk to your front door. Both are transitions, both are predictable, and both are where people get hurt. Before you push the door open at the garage level, stop inside it for two seconds and look. Keep your phone down and your hands free. Unlock the car when you’re at the car, not from across the deck — the chirp and the lights tell everyone in there which one is yours and that you’re thirty feet away from it. Back into the spot so you can leave forward.
4. Give your family one word. One word that means get in the car and go, don’t ask me why, I’ll explain later. Say it out loud with them once, in daylight, so the first time they hear it isn’t the night it matters. Executives harden themselves and leave the house soft, and the house is where the people you actually care about are.
5. Practice the ten seconds of the call. Who do you call, on what number, and what do you say first? Say the address first. Almost everyone leads with the story and gets to the address last, and the story is worthless until a car is rolling. Address, then what’s happening, then who you are.
If you carry, add a sixth: dry practice the draw from what you actually wear to work, not from an open-front range rig. Most carry pistols today have no manual safety, which means the holster is the safety — it covers the trigger guard and it stays on the gun until the gun is in your hand. A pistol loose in a console or a bag has no safety at all.
The standard
Protection is something a company can buy for you. Capability is not. It doesn’t appear as a line item in a proxy statement, it can’t be procured, and nobody can carry it on your behalf.
The gap between being protected and being capable is where incidents happen, and it’s trainable in less time than most executives spend on their annual physical.
You’re not paranoid. You’re managing a risk that’s already on your books — your own filings say so.
I run a Situational Readiness Assessment for executives and their families across the Denver metro area and at field sites. It starts with the gap list above, done properly, with someone who has worked the other side of it. If your company just increased what it spends on your safety, this is the part the increase didn’t cover.
John Rader
Colorado Tactics, LLC
Slow is smooth… Smooth is FAST!
720-464-SHOT | 720-464-7468
Sources
- Pay Governance, “Executive Security and Protection Continues to Expand,” August 27, 2026 — paygovernance.com
- Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (reprint), September 15, 2026 — corpgov.law.harvard.edu
- Equilar, “Early Look: Executive Security Perks on the Rise,” April 10, 2026 — equilar.com