What IQ Do You Need to Be a CEO?

No company requires an IQ score to appoint a chief executive. And unusually, we do not have to rely on occupational estimates here, because somebody managed to measure it properly.

The one profession with real data

Sweden had mandatory military service between 1970 and 1996, and the government systematically tested young men’s cognitive ability at around age 18.

Adams, Keloharju and Knüpfer realised this created something almost unheard of: cognitive test scores for essentially an entire male population, recorded years before anyone knew who would go on to run a company. They matched a near-exhaustive sample of Swedish CEOs to those records and published the results in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2018.

That design avoids the problem affecting almost every other figure in this series. Occupational data measures people who already arrived in a profession. This measured everyone first, then looked at who arrived.

The finding, which is lower than you expect

The median large-company CEO sits in the top 17% of the population in cognitive ability. That is roughly the 83rd percentile, corresponding to an IQ of about 115.

Widen it to a combination of cognitive ability, non-cognitive ability and height, and large-company CEOs sit in the top 5%.

The authors’ own summary is worth quoting in substance: while CEOs have better traits than the population average, they are neither exceptional in any of the traits nor in their combination.

An IQ of around 115 is the same figure this site reports as the average for someone holding a doctorate, and as one standard deviation above the mean, reached by about one person in six. The typical large-company chief executive is, cognitively, in roughly the same place as the typical PhD holder.

Top 5% in traits, top 0.2% in pay

This is the number that makes the study worth reading.

Top 5% in measurable characteristics. Top 0.2% in compensation. Those are two orders of magnitude apart, and the researchers quantified the consequence: less than a quarter of the CEO pay premium over the general population could be attributed to the traits they measured.

Which leaves more than three quarters of it explained by something else entirely. The study does not settle what that something is, and it is worth being careful rather than jumping to a favourite explanation. Network effects, firm size, bargaining position, market structure and luck are all candidates, and none of them is a cognitive characteristic.

What the study cannot tell you

• It is Swedish. Corporate structures, pay norms and routes into leadership differ between countries, and Sweden is more compressed on pay than the US in particular.
• It covers men. The conscription data exists because military service was compulsory for men, so the sample is male by construction.
• It measures at 18. Cognitive scores are quite stable after adolescence, but this is a measure taken decades before the appointment.
• It describes who became CEO, not what makes someone effective in the role. Those are different questions and the study answers the first.

What actually gets people there

If ability accounts for so little of the outcome, the rest is worth naming honestly:

• Sector and timing. Being in a growing industry at the right moment
• Visibility. Being seen by the people who make appointments
• Willingness to take positional risk, repeatedly, over a career
• Non-cognitive traits, which the Swedish study measured separately and found contributed alongside ability
• Luck, which is not a residual category so much as a large and genuine input

None of this makes cognitive ability irrelevant. Top 17% is meaningfully above average and the association is real. It means the ability is closer to an entry condition than an explanation, and the popular image of the chief executive as a cognitive outlier is not what the measurement found.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

No IQ is required, and for once the answer rests on real measurement rather than occupational estimates. The median large-company CEO sits in the top 17% of the population on cognitive ability, roughly IQ 115, which is about where the average doctorate holder sits.

The finding that matters is the mismatch: top 5% in measurable traits, top 0.2% in pay, with less than a quarter of the pay premium attributable to those traits. Whatever explains chief executive compensation, the study that measured it most carefully concluded it is mostly not cognitive ability.