Chief financial officers (CFOs) are entering the 2026 budget cycle with a clear mandate to balance growth ambitions with disciplined cost management amid economic uncertainty, according to a survey by Gartner.
According to Gartner’s 2026 Budget Assumptions survey of 142 chief financial officers (CFOs) and senior finance leaders – taken August through September 2025 – 64% of CFOs are planning for their selling, general and administrative (SG&A) budgets to grow more slowly than their 2026 revenue growth rate. Fifty-four percent anticipate SG&A growth to be one to five percentage points below revenue growth, signaling a strong intent to contain overhead costs while still aiming for revenue expansion.
“CFOs are signaling that operational efficiency, not just revenue growth, will define success in the coming year,” says Randeep Rathindran, distinguished vice-president: research in the Gartner Finance practice. “A focus on SG&A discipline reflects a concerted effort to right size overheads even as organisations pursue top-line expansion.”
CFOs are leveraging SG&A expense discipline as their primary lever to drive operating expense (opex) savings and are setting explicit operating expense savings targets. While 37% of CFOs are aiming for modest opex savings of 1% to 2%, a slightly larger share, 42%, is pursuing more substantial savings of 3% to 5% of overall opex.
Rather than implementing broad, across-the-board cuts, CFOs are calibrating their approach, seeking incremental cost containment that preserves essential capabilities and drives productivity improvements.
CFOs are focusing their SG&A reductions on functions where technology, automation, or process redesign can yield efficiency gains. The most cited areas for budget reductions in 2026 include:
- Human Resources (57%)
- Corporate IT (53%)
- Legal and Compliance (40%)
- Corporate Finance (36%)
- Marketing (27%)
This pattern reflects a growing willingness to rethink traditional support functions considering conservative hiring plans and AI-driven transformation. In fact, 42% of CFOs anticipate some level of AI-driven headcount reduction across SG&A or support functions, with 33% expecting reductions between 1% to 5%.
These modest headcount reduction assumptions are expected given AI’s improving effectiveness at performing rule-based and judgment-based SG&A work.
Beyond SG&A, CFOs are betting on product-mix optimization and headcount discipline to protect margins in the face of rising costs. For 2026, 51% of CFOs expect the contribution margin for core products or services to increase, and 44% anticipate a shift of one to five percentage points toward higher-margin offerings in their product mix. This reflects a deliberate effort to protect profitability through product mix optimisation rather than relying solely on cost-cutting.
CFOs are also assuming higher personnel costs for 2026. Nearly half of organizations expect a year-over-year increase in direct labor rates of more than four percent, given labor scarcity and tighter enforcement of immigration restrictions in the US, for example. Almost three in four CFOs assume annual average merit increases of 3% in workforce compensation.
“While financial leaders are conservative on overall headcount increases in 2026, they are also factoring in the likelihood of higher costs for personnel and third-party spending, adding to the pressure of achieving operational efficiency,” says Rathindran.