The money corporate America spends protecting its executives has moved sharply upward, and the disclosure trail proves it. Open-source reporting drawing on Equilar proxy-filing data shows that by 2024 nearly a third of S&P 500 firms provided a security perquisite to executives, a rise of around 28% on 2023 and roughly 47% higher than 2021. By mid-2025 more than 34% of the index disclosed one, up about 21% year on year. Median disclosed spend reached close to $95,000 in 2024, with five-year median growth of nearly 120%.
The drivers are not abstract. The reporting points to societal polarisation, activist and grievance-fuelled violence, and the now-routine jump from online harassment to a real-world approach. Technology firms feel it hardest, with close to 70% reporting heightened threats against roughly 45% across all sectors. A separate Goldman Sachs note in October 2025 put the share of companies offering personal security to their CEO at around 25%, up nearly 60% in two years.
For operators, the read is straightforward. This is a demand-side expansion, not just consolidation among the firms that hire you. More boards are signing off protection budgets, more of that protection is being formally disclosed, and the trigger is increasingly the executive as a target in their own right rather than generic corporate risk. The work is shifting toward residential security, travel risk, online-to-physical threat monitoring and family protection, not only the principal's day movements. Operators and small firms positioned to deliver that fuller package — and to evidence it to a board that now has to disclose the spend — are the ones the budget growth reaches.
