Head of Finance Job Description Template + 2026 Salaries

This guide provides a Head of Finance job description you can adapt and use, together with 2026 UK salary benchmarks and practical advice on specifying the role well. It is written as a working tool for employers: the template below covers purpose, responsibilities, person specification, reporting lines and success measures, with notes on what to change for your circumstances. If you are still deciding whether Head of Finance is the right seat rather than a Financial Controller or Finance Director, read our guide on what a Head of Finance does first — this one assumes the decision is made. The role is placed through our Head of Finance recruitment practice.

Before you write: three decisions to make

A job description is only as good as the thinking behind it, and three decisions shape everything in the template. Reporting line: most Heads of Finance report to a CEO or Managing Director as the senior-most finance person; some report to a COO or an FD. State it, because candidates read it as the clearest signal of the role’s standing. Team: what exists beneath the role today and what the hire is expected to build — a Head of Finance with a functioning team is a different job from one inheriting a single bookkeeper. Trajectory: is this a settled leadership seat, or a role intended to grow toward Finance Director as the business scales? Both are legitimate, but say which, because the ambiguity that feels flexible at hiring becomes friction at the first pay review and costs you good candidates who need to know.

The job description template

Adapt the text below. Square brackets mark the parts to change.

Job title: Head of Finance
Reports to: [Chief Executive / Managing Director]
Direct reports: [e.g. Management Accountant, Finance Assistant — state the team]
Location: [location and hybrid pattern]
Salary: [range] plus [bonus, pension, benefits]

Purpose of the role. To lead the finance function of [business], owning all financial control, reporting, planning and cash management, and acting as the senior finance voice within the leadership team. The Head of Finance is responsible both for the integrity of the numbers and for turning them into insight that shapes commercial decisions as the business grows.

Key responsibilities. Own the month-end close and produce management accounts and a board pack that the leadership team uses to make decisions. Own cash flow forecasting and working capital management, including the rolling cash position and any lender or investor reporting. Lead the annual budget and periodic reforecasts, working with budget holders across the business. Own the statutory accounts and the audit relationship, alongside tax compliance with external advisers. Maintain and develop financial controls, processes and systems appropriate to the size and growth of the business. Lead, develop and (as the business grows) build the finance team. Act as the finance partner to the [CEO/MD] and the wider leadership team, providing analysis and challenge on commercial decisions. Manage relationships with banks, auditors, accountants and other external finance stakeholders. [Add sector-specific duties: regulatory reporting, project accounting, grant reporting, stock and costing.]

Person specification — essential. Qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA or CIMA) with post-qualification experience in a comparable role. Proven ownership of a full month-end close and statutory reporting cycle. Experience of cash flow forecasting and budgeting in a business of similar size or complexity. Line-management experience, or clear evidence of readiness to lead a small team. Commercially minded, with the ability to explain financial matters clearly to non-financial colleagues. Comfortable being hands-on: this is a role that leads and does.

Person specification — desirable. Experience in [sector]. Systems implementation or process improvement experience. Exposure to [fundraising / acquisitions / investor reporting / regulated reporting] as relevant. Experience of scaling a finance function through growth.

Success in the first twelve months. [Adapt these:] The month-end close runs reliably to [day X] with a board pack the leadership team relies on. A rolling cash forecast is in place and trusted. The budget process runs to timetable with genuine budget-holder ownership. Financial controls are documented and appropriate to the business. The audit runs efficiently with no material findings. The [CEO/MD] spends materially less time on finance matters than before the hire.

Head of Finance salary benchmarks 2026

Head of Finance sits between Financial Controller and Finance Director in the pay hierarchy, and the range is wide because the title covers businesses of very different sizes.

Bonuses of 10–20% are common, with equity or long-term incentives appearing in scaling and investor-backed businesses. Wider benchmarks across the function are in our salary guides.

Writing the advert

The job description is an internal specification; the advert is a sales document, and they should not be the same text. Three principles improve response. Lead with the proposition, not the duties: the strongest Heads of Finance are employed and moderately content, so the opening should say why this role is interesting — the growth story, the autonomy, the chance to build a function — before it lists responsibilities. Be specific about the state of play: honest detail about what works and what does not attracts the right candidate and filters the wrong one; “the close currently takes fifteen days and we want it at eight” is more compelling to a good candidate than “excellent finance function”. Name the trajectory: if the role can grow into an FD seat, say so, because that is the single most attractive feature for ambitious candidates. And state the salary range: withholding it in a competitive market costs applications from exactly the experienced candidates who will not speculate.

Adapting the template: four common variants

The template above describes the standard case. Four variants come up often enough to be worth spelling out. The first senior hire. Where the Head of Finance is the business’s first qualified finance leader, add explicit responsibility for establishing processes and controls from a low base, remove assumptions about an existing team, and be candid in the advert that the role involves building rather than inheriting — the right candidate finds that appealing, and the wrong one needs to know. The investor-backed business. Add investor reporting, covenant compliance and board-pack preparation to the responsibilities, add “experience of investor or lender reporting” to the desirable specification, and expect to pay toward the upper end of the range. The regulated firm. Add the regulatory reporting obligations, any client-money or safeguarding oversight, and the SMCR dimension if relevant; the person specification should name the regime, and the salary should carry the regulated premium set out in our regulated-firm salary guide. The multi-entity business. Add consolidation and intercompany responsibilities explicitly, and be honest about whether the role needs genuine group-reporting experience — if it does, you may be describing a Group Financial Controller and should say so, because mislabelling narrows the pool.

KPIs and how to measure the role

Beyond the twelve-month success measures in the template, a Head of Finance role benefits from a small set of ongoing measures agreed at the outset — both to focus the hire and to make performance conversations objective. The ones that work: close speed and reliability (working days to management accounts, and whether the date holds); forecast accuracy (variance between forecast and actual cash and profit, tracked over time and improving); audit outcome (findings raised, findings closed, time consumed); budget process delivery (to timetable, with budget-holder ownership rather than finance-imposed numbers); control environment (documented, reviewed, with issues identified internally rather than externally); and, less measurable but most important, leadership-team confidence in the numbers — worth asking about directly in a quarterly conversation. Keep the set short: six measures the person can actually influence beat twenty that dilute focus, and a Head of Finance judged on a sensible handful will build the function around them.

Common specification mistakes

Four errors recur and each costs shortlist quality. The shopping list — every finance task the business might ever need, producing a specification no real candidate matches and a shortlist of optimists. The inflated title — advertising Head of Finance for what is genuinely a Finance Manager role, which attracts candidates who leave when they discover the scope, and repels the good Finance Managers who would have been ideal. The silent trajectory — not saying whether the role grows toward FD, which loses the ambitious candidates who need to know and disappoints those who assumed it did. The unstated mess — describing an idealised function and letting the new hire discover the reality in week two, which is the most reliable way to lose a good appointment inside a year. All four are avoidable with an honest hour spent on the specification before the search starts, and a specialist recruiter will push back on each of them — our Head of Finance practice tests the brief against the market before advertising, precisely because a specification that does not add up wastes everyone’s time.

From specification to shortlist: running the search

A good specification is the start; the search process determines whether it reaches the right people. Three practical points. The strongest candidates are passive. Heads of Finance in good roles are not scanning job boards, so a search that relies solely on advertising reaches the actively-looking minority — which includes excellent people, but misses most of the market. Direct approach, whether through your own network or a specialist desk, is what surfaces the rest. Speed matters more than most employers assume. Senior finance candidates in demand run two or three processes at once, and the business that takes four weeks between interviews loses to the one that takes four days — diarise the stages before the search starts rather than scheduling reactively. Interview for the whole role. Because Head of Finance combines leadership, technical ownership and commercial partnering, the process should test all three: a technical conversation, a leadership and situational conversation, and exposure to the CEO or MD the person will partner — that last one is decisive, because the relationship between the Head of Finance and the business leader determines whether the appointment works. Where a team exists, letting a candidate meet one of them tells you something too, and tells the candidate more.

Interim and fractional alternatives

Not every Head of Finance need is a permanent full-time one, and the specification should follow the need rather than the convention. Interim suits a defined gap — cover for a departure, a bridge while a permanent search runs, or a project such as a systems implementation or a fundraising process — at day rates of £450–£650 in London. It also suits the business that is not certain the permanent role is justified: an interim Head of Finance proves the scope, and the eventual permanent specification is written from experience rather than guesswork. Fractional suits the business whose need is genuinely part-time — real senior finance leadership one or two days a week, at perhaps £45,000–£65,000 a year rather than a full salary — and pairs well with an in-house Management Accountant handling daily delivery, the model described in our guide to the fractional-plus-in-house hybrid. Both routes convert naturally to permanent when the business grows into the full-time seat, and both are worth considering before committing to a salary the business may not yet need. The template above adapts to either — the responsibilities stay, the commitment and the success measures scale down.

Onboarding: making the specification real

A job description does its final work after the hire, and the businesses that get most from a Head of Finance treat the first ninety days as deliberately as the search. Transfer authority explicitly. The most common cause of a disappointing Head of Finance appointment is not candidate quality but withheld authority — the founder or CEO who recruits a finance leader and keeps approving every payment has bought a salary rather than a function. Agree a written delegated-authority schedule in the first month, however simple. Introduce them properly to the leadership team. The commercial partnering half of the role depends on relationships that form in the first weeks; a Head of Finance who spends month one in the ledger and month two meeting the business has already lost ground. Agree the first-year measures from the template in writing, so both sides know what success looks like rather than discovering a mismatch at the first review. Protect their time for the build. A Head of Finance hired to improve a function needs capacity beyond the monthly cycle, which means either accepting slower business-as-usual for a quarter or providing interim support during the transition. And schedule an honest three-month conversation: what have they found that you did not know, what do they need, and is the role as described? The answers to those three questions in month three predict the appointment’s success better than anything in the interview.

Frequently asked questions

Is Head of Finance more senior than Financial Controller? Usually, in that it implies a leadership and commercial dimension the FC title does not, though usage varies and the written scope matters more than the label. Should the salary range go in the advert? Yes in almost all cases — withholding it costs applications from experienced candidates who will not speculate, and it wastes everyone’s time if expectations do not align. Can a Finance Manager step up to Head of Finance? Often, where the business is growing and the individual has the leadership range; the specification should then be honest that it is a step up, with support to match. Do we need a qualified accountant? At this level, almost always — ACA, ACCA or CIMA is the market standard and the credibility the role needs internally and externally. How long does the search take? Permanent Head of Finance searches typically run five to seven working days to shortlist and four to eight weeks to offer, depending on notice periods; interim cover can start within days. What if we cannot afford the range? Consider the fractional or interim routes above before compromising on calibre — a strong Head of Finance two days a week generally beats a weak one five days a week.