The United States

Why a shared seat here

This is the one market on Atlas where a company does not need convincing that the seat exists. It is also the market with the worst published numbers. There is no official statistic for fractional executives anywhere in the federal data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count them, the Census does not count them, and every market-size figure in circulation is vendor-published with undisclosed method. Atlas does not repeat any of them.

What the federal data does support is narrower and more useful. Independent contracting reached 11.9 million people, 7.4% of total employment, when the Bureau last ran the survey in July 2023, up from 6.9% in 2017. Census counted 29.8 million nonemployer businesses for 2023 and found they grew faster than employer businesses in almost every year since 2012. The senior end of that is not separately measured by anybody credible, and a page that tells you otherwise is quoting a brochure.

Fifty employment regimes, one page

Two thirds of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware, and that decides governance and fiduciary duty. It decides almost nothing else. Classification, wage and hour, non-compete, pay transparency and leave all follow the state where the work is actually performed, which is why an engagement structured once for a Delaware parent can still be wrong in California.

Four or five states change the deal rather than decorate it. California applies a statutory ABC test under Labor Code section 2775. New Jersey adopted its own ABC regulation on 5 May 2026, operative 1 October 2026, reaching work performed in New Jersey whatever the hiring entity's address. New York and Colorado carry the pay transparency and automated-decision rules. Delaware carries the incorporation. Atlas treats the United States as one market and names those states rather than pretending the country is uniform.

The paperwork an engagement is invoiced against

The federal position is genuinely unsettled, and a company relying on the headline has misread it. The Department of Labor's 2024 independent contractor rule is still on the books at 29 CFR Part 795. In May 2025 the Wage and Hour Division told its own investigators to stop applying it, and said in the same bulletin that the rule remains in effect for private litigation. A proposal to rescind it published in February 2026 and comments closed that April, with no final rule as at 16 September 2026. So the rule is unenforced by the agency that wrote it and fully available to a plaintiff. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is a defence.

In California the route most fractional executives actually use is the business-to-business exemption at Labor Code section 2776, and it has twelve conditions that all have to hold: a written contract with stated amounts, the required licences, a separate business location, holding out publicly, own tools, own rates, own hours, and the rest. Clearing all twelve does not make somebody a contractor. It moves the test from ABC to the older Borello balancing test. Worth knowing seat by seat: the professional services exemption at section 2778 names an administrator of human resources and names marketing, and names neither CFO nor CTO.

The trap nobody expects sits at the client end. Under 26 CFR 31.3121(d)-1(b) an officer of a corporation is generally an employee of that corporation, so formally appointing a fractional executive as Chief Financial Officer carries an employment-tax consequence that serving as one does not. Title is not cosmetic here.

The gap worth reading twice

At a public company the two liabilities do not line up. Section 302 of Sarbanes-Oxley requires certification by the principal financial officer or persons performing similar functions, and section 906 makes a knowing false certification criminal, up to ten years, twenty if willful. Form 8-K item 5.02(c) treats the appointment of a person performing similar functions as a disclosure event on a four business day clock. Every one of those tests is functional. None of them asks whether the person is an employee.

Directors and officers insurance does ask. Delaware's section 145 gives a company the power to indemnify and insure directors, officers, employees and agents, so employment is not the obstacle, but a policy defines insured persons by reference to duly elected or appointed officers. A fractional executive who is never formally appointed can sit inside the SEC's definition and outside the policy's. Section 102(b)(7) then adds that officers get no exculpation in a derivative suit, where directors do. An operator who has been appointed, named on the policy, and can say so is carrying a different risk from one who has not.

The regulation behind the AI Officer seat

The demand here does not come from an AI statute, and the page that says it does is out of date. Colorado's SB 24-205 was delayed to June 2026, stayed by a federal court that April, then repealed and reenacted by SB 26-189 in May 2026 as a narrower automated-decision regime effective 1 January 2027. It dropped the algorithmic discrimination duty that made the original notable.

What creates the seat is the collision. Twenty-three states have enacted comprehensive consumer privacy laws and nineteen are in force as at September 2026, which is nineteen sets of duties for one customer database. The EU AI Act reaches a US company whose system output is used in the Union, and its dates moved six days before they landed: the July 2026 digital omnibus deferred standalone high-risk obligations to 2 December 2027 and embedded ones to 2 August 2028, while leaving the article 50 transparency duties live from 2 August 2026. Over all of it sits the SEC's four business day clock on a material cybersecurity incident, in force since December 2023 and contested since. Somebody has to hold that calendar. That is the job.

What a rate looks like here

Atlas publishes no market rate. The defensible full-time comparison is the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational survey for May 2025, published in May 2026: a median of $213,990 for chief executives, $166,570 for financial managers, $175,140 for computer and information systems managers, and $149,280 for human resources managers.

Read those against a private survey rather than instead of one, and read the populations before comparing. Salary.com's employer-reported CFO benchmark sat at a $438,708 median when it was read on 1 September 2026, and it is not contradicting the Bureau. The Bureau's financial managers category counts every financial manager in the country including bank branch managers, and the private benchmark counts the single top finance seat at larger employers. Robert Half's 2026 guide gives a CFO starting range of $195,500 to $321,750, and those are starting salaries excluding bonus rather than percentiles.

What the rules mean for the people seat

The national non-compete ban is gone and the ending was formal rather than ambiguous. The Federal Trade Commission's rule was set aside in Texas in August 2024, the Commission voted in September 2025 to dismiss its appeals and accede to vacatur, and in February 2026 it removed the rule from the Code of Federal Regulations. Non-competes are state law again, and a CHRO working across states is working across that patchwork rather than under one rule.

Pay transparency is the other patchwork, and most published counts are wrong because they mix two different duties. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia require the range inside the posting itself as at September 2026, Virginia and Maine having joined in July of that year. Three more, Connecticut, Nevada and Rhode Island, require disclosure without requiring it in the posting, and Connecticut moves into the first group on 1 October 2026. The trackers that say seventeen or eighteen have folded the second group into the first.

One federal number is worth carrying. An employer with fifty or more full-time or full-time-equivalent employees is inside the Affordable Care Act mandate, and for calendar year 2026 the two penalty amounts are $3,340 and $5,010 per the relevant revenue procedure. The 2027 figures of $3,780 and $5,670 are already published and are routinely quoted a year early.

The bar is the same everywhere

Six tests stand between a leader and a live page, and they do not change from one market to the next. One of them is that two of a leader’s ten senior years were worked in the market they are listed in, which is the test this page exists to make checkable. Read the standard.

Nothing on this page is legal, tax or immigration advice. Rules and fees change, and a figure that was correct when it was written may not be correct when it is read. Verify with a qualified adviser before acting.