The 356 billion dollars a year quoted as global spending on leadership development is Training Industry, Inc.'s estimate of everything companies spent on training in 2015. Compliance courses, IT training, onboarding and tuition reimbursement are all in it. The same firm estimated the external market for leadership training at about 3.4 billion dollars in 2018, roughly one hundredth of the total now attributed to leadership.
We followed the figure from Harvard Business Review, through a Forbes column, to two versions of Training Industry's market page and the leadership report it published in 2019. The number is real. The label moved.
The 356 billion is every training dollar, in one year
The article that put the figure into circulation is Beer, Finnström and Schrader's "Why Leadership Training Fails", Harvard Business Review, October 2016. Its opening paragraph gives 160 billion dollars in the United States and close to 356 billion globally in 2015, and it describes both as spending on "employee training and education". The article names no source for either number.
Both numbers match a table published by Training Industry, Inc. Its market sizing page gives global spend of 355.6 billion dollars for 2015 and 160.0 billion for North America. So the 160 billion in the HBR article is a North American figure, Canada included, printed as a US one.
The page states what the total covers. It "includes all dollars spent by companies for training activities, including insourced and outsourced spend", and payments by companies to universities for corporate programmes. Individuals paying for their own courses are left out. The method is described in a sentence, "data from multiple expert sources" combined with Training Industry's own segment analyses, and no model is published from which the total could be recomputed. Leadership development is not broken out on the page, then or now.
"Leadership" was attached in 2019, to the next year's total
On 23 April 2019 Training Industry updated the page. The version archived that December shows 366.2 billion dollars of global training spend for 2018, of which 166.8 billion was in North America, and carries the same definition: all training activities.
Two months later, on 20 June 2019, a Forbes contributor column ran under the headline "Leadership Development Is A $366 Billion Industry". Its text reads "TrainingIndustry.com says that leadership training is $366 billion global industry", with a link to the market sizing page. Further down it gives "an estimated $166 billion annual spend on leadership development in the USA alone". That is the North American training total again, relabelled twice: as leadership, and as the United States.
The two figures in circulation now, 356 and 366 billion, are therefore the same series read in different years. Neither was ever an estimate of leadership development.
| Year published | Where | Figure | What it was called |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Harvard Business Review | 356 billion, 2015 | Employee training and education |
| 2019 | Training Industry market page | 366.2 billion, 2018 | All corporate training spend |
| 2019 | Forbes contributor column | 366 billion | Leadership training industry |
| 2019 | Forbes contributor column | 166 billion | Leadership development, USA |
| 2019 | Training Industry leadership report | 3.4 billion, 2018 | External spend on leadership training |
The source's own leadership estimate was 3.4 billion dollars
In April 2019, the month it updated the market page, Training Industry also published The State of the Leadership Training Market. It opens its sizing section with the same 366.2 billion total for all training, then estimates "that in 2018, approximately $3.4 billion was spent externally on leadership training programs throughout the world." North America accounted for around 1.9 billion dollars of that, the rest of the world for 1.5 billion.
The 3.4 billion counts only money paid to outside providers. The report notes that some organisations build leadership programmes "with internal resources" and does not estimate that spend. So the true leadership figure sits above 3.4 billion by an unknown amount. It would have to be about a hundred times larger to reach the number quoted for it.
The total has been updated, and has fallen in real terms
Training Industry keeps the page current. The version updated in July 2026 gives 394.5 billion dollars for 2025 and an estimate of 398.8 billion for 2026, alongside 357.7 billion for 2020 and the unchanged 355.6 billion for 2015. The years in between are no longer shown.
In nominal terms the total rose 11 percent between 2015 and 2025. We deflated it with the US consumer price index, the BLS all-items series, whose annual average moved from 237.017 in 2015 to 321.943 in 2025. At 2025 prices the 2015 figure is about 483 billion dollars, so real spending on corporate training by this measure fell by about 18 percent. US prices are a rough deflator for a global total, but they do not reverse the direction.
Eurostat's figures for Europe point the same way: spending per trained person fell 24 percent in real terms between 2005 and 2020.
The last US total specific to leadership is for 2013
Bersin by Deloitte did publish leadership-specific totals for the United States. Its 2012 Leadership Development Factbook, based on an online study of nearly 400 US organisations, put US spending at an estimated 13.6 billion dollars in 2012. The 2014 edition gave 15.5 billion dollars for 2013. McKinsey's 2014 article on failing leadership programmes quotes "almost $14 billion" and footnotes the 2012 Factbook.
Those press releases also carry the only per-leader figures we could find from a named survey. In 2012 companies spent about 7,100 dollars per high-potential leader. In 2013 first-level managers in large organisations received on average 2,600 dollars each, the lowest per-person funding of any leader level. The factbooks themselves were sold to members, so the subgroup samples cannot be checked, and we found no later edition with a US leadership total.
Other round numbers have no origin at all. A Fast Company column from June 2024 gives more than 60 billion dollars a year for leadership development, linking only to an earlier article on the same site that contains no spending figure.
Current US survey data gives a share, not a total
The nearest current measure is the 2025 Training Industry Report from Training magazine, a survey of US organisations with 100 or more employees, projected to 152,572 companies. It puts total US training expenditure at 102.8 billion dollars in 2025 and average spend at 874 dollars per learner.
On average, it finds, organisations "allocated the biggest portions of their training budget to mandatory compliance training and management/supervisory training (both at 13 percent)." Executive development is tracked as a separate category in the same survey.
The two estimators disagree on the whole. Training magazine's 102.8 billion for the United States in 2025 sits against Training Industry's 186.4 billion for North America. Canada and firms under 100 staff explain part of that gap, and market totals are softer than their decimals suggest.
| Measure | Figure | Source and year |
|---|---|---|
| All corporate training, global | $394.5B | Training Industry, 2025 |
| All corporate training, US, firms with 100+ staff | $102.8B | Training magazine, 2025 |
| Spend per learner, all training, US | $874 | Training magazine, 2025 |
| Share of budget on management and supervisory training | 13% | Training magazine, 2025 |
| External leadership training, global | $3.4B | Training Industry, 2018 |
| Leadership development, US | $15.5B | Bersin by Deloitte, 2013 |
| Per first-level manager, large US organisations | $2,600 | Bersin by Deloitte, 2013 |
A worked example with the survey averages
Take an illustrative US company of 600 staff that trains 500 of them a year at the survey average of 874 dollars per learner. Its training budget comes to about 437,000 dollars. At the average 13 percent share, management and supervisory training gets about 56,800 dollars. Spread over 60 managers that is about 950 dollars each.
That is a little over a third of the 2,600 dollars Bersin reported per first-level manager in large firms in 2013, before a decade of inflation. Different surveys, different definitions: neither is a benchmark in the strict sense, and they are the only published figures on what a leader's development costs. For European firms the Eurostat survey gives spend per head of workforce and per participant by company size, set out in what firms of different sizes spend on training. It has no line for leadership.
Nobody publishes the number the budget question needs
No statistical office publishes spending on leadership development. The only leadership-specific market estimate is one firm's figure for external spend, last public for 2018. The only US total is a membership survey from 2013. A per-leader figure broken down by level and firm size, measured in the same way each year, would settle most of what the 356 billion was ever used to argue. It has not been published by anyone whose method can be checked.
Common questions
How much do companies spend on leadership development worldwide? Nobody publishes a verifiable global total. Training Industry, Inc. estimated external spending on leadership training at about 3.4 billion dollars in 2018, which leaves out programmes run by companies' own staff. The 356 and 366 billion dollar figures often quoted are estimates of all corporate training.
Where does the 356 billion dollar figure come from? From Training Industry, Inc., which estimated global corporate training spend at 355.6 billion dollars in 2015. Harvard Business Review quoted it in October 2016 as spending on employee training and education, without naming the source.
Why do some sources say 366 billion dollars? It is the same series one edition later. Training Industry put global training spend at 366.2 billion dollars for 2018, and a 2019 Forbes column described that total as the size of the leadership training industry.
How much do US companies spend on leadership development? The last published estimate specific to leadership is 15.5 billion dollars for 2013, from Bersin by Deloitte. The 166 billion dollar figure sometimes quoted is Training Industry's North American total for all training in 2018.
How much is spent per leader on development? The only figures from a named survey date from 2012 and 2013. Bersin reported about 7,100 dollars per high-potential leader in 2012 and 2,600 dollars per first-level manager in large US organisations in 2013.
What share of a training budget goes to management training? Training magazine's 2025 survey of US organisations with 100 or more employees found that management and supervisory training took 13 percent of the training budget on average, level with compliance training as the largest single share.
Sources
- Beer, Finnström & Schrader (2016), Why Leadership Training Fails, and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review, October 2016
- Training Industry, Inc., What is the Size of the Training Industry? (current version, updated 10 July 2026)
- Training Industry, Inc., Size of the Training Industry, version updated 23 April 2019, Internet Archive capture of 13 December 2019
- Training Industry, Inc. (2019), The State of the Leadership Training Market
- Chris Westfall (2019), Leadership Development Is A $366 Billion Industry: Here's Why Most Programs Don't Work, Forbes, 20 June 2019
- Bersin & Associates (2012), U.S. Leadership Development Spending Surges 14 Percent to an Estimated $13.6 Billion in 2012, press release, 16 July 2012
- Bersin by Deloitte (2014), US Leadership Development Spending Up Again 14 Percent to More Than $15 Billion in 2013, press release, 14 May 2014
- Gurdjian, Halbeisen & Lane (2014), Why leadership-development programs fail, McKinsey Quarterly, January 2014
- Training magazine (2025), 2025 Training Industry Report, 10 November 2025
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, all items, US city average (CUUR0000SA0), annual averages
- Fast Company (2024), Companies spend more than $60 billion on leadership development annually, 27 June 2024
