It's 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. Every teacher went home hours ago. The custodian locked up at 6. You're still at your desk, not for grading, but because a parent called a board member after hours, a student got hurt at practice, and 47 emails are still sitting in your inbox before you've even thought about dinner. Nobody sees that part of the job. Nobody is supposed to.

Teacher burnout gets the headlines. Principal and superintendent burnout is the bigger, quieter number, and new research is finally naming why it happens and what it costs a district.

What Does the Research Say About Principal and Superintendent Burnout?

RAND's State of the American Principal survey is the most cited benchmark in this space. Lead author Elizabeth D. Steiner and her RAND colleagues found that 85% of principals reported frequent job-related stress, compared to 73% of teachers and 35% of other working adults (RAND, 2022). Forty-eight percent of principals said they were facing burnout, matching the rate teachers reported the same year, and more than a quarter reported symptoms of depression (RAND, 2022; EdWeek, 2022).

That 85% figure is more than twice the rate of the general working population.

A 2025 systematic review in the Review of Educational Research, by Laura K. Rogers, Tuan D. Nguyen, Marieke Timmer, and Joshua N. Samson at the University of Missouri, coded 99 empirical studies of principal burnout published between 1983 and early 2022 (Rogers et al., 2025). Their conclusion: concern about principal burnout has grown sharply since the pandemic, and the policy response has not caught up with the data.

A parallel UK study found the same pattern outside the US. Education Support's Teacher Wellbeing Index 2022, conducted with YouGov, found that senior leaders, headteachers, principals, deputy and assistant heads, showed the highest rates of burnout and exhaustion of any group in the school workforce: 37% showed signs of burnout versus 27% of classroom teachers, and 41% reported exhaustion versus 30% of teachers (Education Support, 2022).

CASEL's research on school leader isolation names the stakes directly: without resources and strategies to manage stress, one in four principals leaves the profession or takes early retirement each year (CASEL, 2024).

Superintendents show the same pattern from a different angle. The ILO Group's 2025 Superintendent Research Project found that 114 of the nation's 500 largest school districts, 23%, replaced their superintendent in a single year. That's up from 20% the year before, and well above the pre-pandemic baseline of 14 to 16% (ILO Group, 2025). ILO Group co-founder and CEO Julia Rafal-Baer put it plainly: "It is straining districts at the very moment students need steady, effective leadership the most."

That's what principal and superintendent burnout looks like at scale: a revolving door, a district without consistent direction, and a staff that has to re-earn trust with a new leader every few years.

Why Is School Leadership Lonelier Than Teaching?

Teachers burn out too, and that's real and well documented. But a teacher who has a hard week can go home Friday and talk to another teacher who had the same week. They can commiserate in the break room. They can text the person down the hall.

A principal can't do that. A superintendent can't do that.

Julia Mahfouz, a researcher at the University of Idaho and author of "Principals and Stress: Few Coping Strategies for Abundant Stressors," documented this directly. Her qualitative research found that principals named three main categories of stressors: work demands, relationships, and time, and responded with guilt, loneliness, and a sense of unfairness. Their coping strategies were thin: time with family, and an outlet outside work, when they had the time or energy for either (Mahfouz, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 2020).

The structural reason for that loneliness is simple. Every hard conversation in the building runs through the principal's office: a teacher conflict, a student mental health crisis, a parent already on the school board's radar. No one else in the building holds that same role. The isolation is built into the job.

CASEL's leadership and wellbeing research says it directly: sole responsibility for decisions that affect children's lives is a defining, permanent feature of the principal's experience, not a side effect of a hard week (CASEL, 2024). Research in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership found that perceived isolation is a significant predictor of burnout in new principals specifically. The newer someone is in the role, the harder the isolation hits.

Mahfouz's research also found that burnout accelerates when principals feel unseen by their communities, and slows when they feel recognized. Recognition is not a soft add-on. It changes how long a principal stays.

A Burned-Out Leader Is a District Infrastructure Problem

Burnout is not only a personal problem for the principal or superintendent living it. It shows up in the district's infrastructure.

When a superintendent leaves, the district spends the next 12 to 18 months in transition. Teachers watch for what changes. Parents start calling board members. The strategic plan the last leader built stalls.

The Council of the Great City Schools found that currently serving urban superintendents have an average tenure of 2.7 years, down from 4.9 years for the leaders who preceded them (Council of the Great City Schools, 2025). Urban districts are getting shorter-tenured leadership right when they need stability most.

On the principal side, NAESP's decade-long tracking, drawing on National Teacher and Principal Survey data, puts the national average tenure at four years as of 2016-17. Thirty-five percent of principals had been at their school less than two years; only 11% had reached ten years or more (NAESP, 2018; Learning Policy Institute, 2021). Every turnover forces a school to absorb the disruption. Teachers rebuild trust. Students feel the instability. Relationships with families reset.

Rogers and colleagues' systematic review confirms what practitioners already know: burnout is a key driver of principal turnover, and high turnover produces less experienced school leadership, which produces weaker outcomes for students (Rogers et al., 2025).

The chain runs in one direction: a leader burns out, the leader leaves, the school loses its footing, and students feel it. Leadership wellbeing and student outcomes are not two conversations. They're one.

Mental Fitness Is What This Job Actually Demands

Mental Fitness is a distinct approach from mental health treatment. Where mental health addresses illness and crisis, Mental Fitness builds the daily habits, inner capacity, and trained skills that let someone carry a hard job without it hollowing them out.

Forte trains Mental Fitness through four pillars: Composition, Capacity, Flexibility, and Endurance. For a principal or superintendent, those four pillars describe exactly what the job demands.

Capacity is how much you can hold: the 7 a.m. parent call before school starts, the 5 p.m. discipline meeting, the board report due Thursday. Endurance is how long you can sustain that output before your body and mind start misfiring. A leader running near empty on both isn't only suffering personally. They're making worse decisions for the people who depend on them.

Frank Iorfino and colleagues at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, defined Mental Fitness in a 2024 paper in npj Mental Health Research as "a construct that goes beyond a simple focus on subjective emotional wellbeing to encompass more broadly our ability to think, feel, and act to achieve what we want in our daily lives" (Iorfino et al., 2024). That's a description of what a principal or superintendent has to do every day.

Rogers and colleagues' review also found that burnout in principals rarely comes from one bad event. It builds from chronic, unaddressed demand with too little recovery. That's a fitness problem, not a therapy problem, and fitness problems respond to training.

What Can HR Leaders Do Right Now?

If you're the HR director or Chief People Officer in a school district, the principal and the superintendent are your employees too. They often get left out of wellness programming because they're supposed to be the strong ones, the ones who run things. That assumption costs districts their leaders.

Three places to start:

• Stop waiting for leaders to ask for help. Mahfouz's research shows principals default to solitary coping because they don't feel safe being vulnerable in the building (Mahfouz, 2020). A support structure that requires them to self-identify and opt in will get low uptake. Bring support to them, on their schedule, not on a waitlist.
• Recognize that a 60-hour week is a Capacity and Endurance problem, not a scheduling one. The first nationally representative study of principal time use found principals average nearly 60 hours a week, with high school principals logging 3 to 5 more hours than their elementary counterparts (K-12 Dive, 2016). That's meaningfully more than a full-time teaching load. Their support structure should reflect that gap, not assume it doesn't exist.
• Name the loneliness. Districts that have cut principal burnout have done it partly by building structured peer connection: not a PD session, not a leadership cohort that meets quarterly, but regular, human, supported connection, what CASEL calls the direct antidote to the isolation built into the role (CASEL, 2024).

Forte pairs school leaders with trained human Coaches, sessions bookable within 24 hours. Forte Members aren't attending a class. They're talking to a person, and that person hears them, often for the first time that week.