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First Trust proxy voting record, 2024-2025

First Trust reported 211,686 proxy votes on Form N-PX for the 2025 season. On the 159,730 ballot items the board itself put forward — directors, pay, the auditor, capital — it voted FOR 92.6% of the time. On the 3,426 environmental and social proposals put on the ballot by shareholders, it voted FOR 2.0% of the time.

2023-20242024-20252025-2026

92.6%Voted for board proposals
2.0%Backed E&S proposals
189,976Ballot items
55,792Proposals
7,071Issuers
161Funds / accounts

On the board’s own proposals

92.6% FOR of 159,730 fund votes on board proposals in 2024-2025: directors, pay, auditor, capital.

92.6% FOR

FOR 147,848 AGAINST 7,700 Abstained or withheld 4,182

How we count these

On proposals shareholders put on the ballot

2.0% FOR of 3,426 fund votes on environmental and social proposals shareholders put on the ballot. The board opposed 3,411.

AGAINST

FOR 70 AGAINST 3,356 Abstained 0

See the 70 it backed →

How we count these

By proposal type

A single “voted with management” figure makes every manager look the same: director elections are most of the volume and nearly everyone votes FOR them. The record is therefore reported per category, using the category the filer itself put on each item in its N-PX.

First Trust, 2024-2025. “Decided” is FOR + AGAINST, the denominator of the two percentage columns; abstentions and withheld votes are shown separately and are never inside a percentage. Counted in ballot items — one fund’s vote on one proposal at one meeting — never in shares.
Proposal type	Put on the ballot by	Items	Decided	Voted FOR	Voted AGAINST	Abstained / withheld
Director Elections	Board (498 inferred)	106,026	100,759	97.1%	2.9%	4,147
Director Elections	Shareholders (101 inferred)	167	109	27.5%	72.5%	0
Corporate Governance	Board	21,872	21,475	92.9%	7.1%	204
Corporate Governance	Shareholders (14 inferred)	2,204	2,177	51.3%	48.7%	8
Say-on-Pay	Board (4,156 inferred)	16,358	15,057	87.5%	12.5%	5
Say-on-Pay	Shareholders (18 inferred)	18	18	100.0%	0.0%	0
Audit-related	Board	15,597	15,506	99.6%	0.4%	2
Audit-related	Shareholders (18 inferred)	174	162	82.1%	17.9%	8
Compensation	Board (93 inferred)	12,620	12,474	84.7%	15.3%	53
Compensation	Shareholders (62 inferred)	609	607	39.2%	60.8%	0
Capital Structure	Board (4 inferred)	11,370	11,323	91.7%	8.3%	6
Capital Structure	Shareholders	157	156	83.3%	16.7%	0
Other Social Issues	Board	628	626	94.4%	5.6%	0
Other Social Issues	Shareholders	2,004	1,999	2.3%	97.7%	0
Environment or Climate	Board	332	330	100.0%	0.0%	0
Environment or Climate	Shareholders	2,024	2,020	2.0%	98.0%	0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion	Board	278	276	100.0%	0.0%	0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion	Shareholders	1,152	1,152	2.6%	97.4%	0
Extraordinary Transactions	Board	1,138	1,128	89.9%	10.1%	4
Extraordinary Transactions	Shareholders (1 inferred)	4	4	75.0%	25.0%	0
Other	Board	856	577	82.3%	17.7%	21
Other	Shareholders	145	145	35.9%	64.1%	0
Human Rights or Human Capital/workforce	Board	270	268	100.0%	0.0%	0
Human Rights or Human Capital/workforce	Shareholders	504	504	1.6%	98.4%	0
Shareholder Rights and Defenses	Board (1 inferred)	495	399	94.0%	6.0%	73
Shareholder Rights and Defenses	Shareholders (4 inferred)	154	145	95.2%	4.8%	0
Investment Company Matters	Board	37	2	100.0%	0.0%	0

An item the filer put in two categories is counted in both rows, so the rows add up to more than the total. Who put an item on the ballot is decided item by item: the filer’s own answer on Form N-PX (Item 1(h)), or, where the filing does not give one, the proposal’s own wording (4,970 items, shown as inferred). The two figures above use only part of these rows: the board figure, board proposals on directors, pay, the auditor, capital, transactions and fund matters; the shareholder figure, environmental, social, workforce and diversity shareholder proposals at US-listed companies. How we count these

Every proposal where First Trust broke with the board (4,795 distinct proposals) →

What is being counted

The unit is a fund-level observation: one fund’s vote on one proposal at one meeting. It is not a share, not a filing line and not a proposal.: First Trust filed 211,686 vote records for 2024-2025; after removing votes filed twice in different N-PX filings, that is 189,976 ballot items (fund-level observations) across 7,071 issuer names and 161 funds. They cover 55,792 distinct proposals: one proposal voted by twenty of its funds is twenty ballot items here and one proposal. Proposals are counted per issuer name and meeting, and wordings of the same director nominee are counted once; two different wordings of any other proposal count twice, so this is an upper bound. A fund that reported several directions for the same item is a split vote, counted on its own (see the table below) and not collapsed into the larger direction. “Issuer names” is literal: filers spell the same company several ways and those are counted separately here, so this runs higher than the number of distinct companies.
Share counts are not used anywhere on this page.: Share figures in N-PX carry their own long list of corrections in this dataset, and a share-weighted rate would inherit every one of them. Every percentage here is a count of items.
Abstentions are reported, never hidden inside a percentage.: On the board’s own proposals an abstention or a withheld vote is not support, so it is in the denominator of the FOR figure and not in its numerator. On shareholder proposals an abstention is neither support nor opposition, so it is excluded from the denominator and shown on its own.
3,193 items are outside both headline figures.: Besides the table rows neither figure uses:

Excluded	Items	Why
Not voted	61	Reported as not voted, take no action or do not vote. No position was expressed, so there is nothing to count.
Other ballot type	2,198	Frequency ballots (one / two / three years) and anything else that is not a FOR, AGAINST, abstention or withhold.
Direction indeterminate	4	The fund reported several directions for one ballot item with no shares attached to any of them, so which way it voted cannot be established.
Split vote	930	The fund voted its shares in more than one direction on the item (for example some FOR and some AGAINST), the smaller part at least 5% of its shares. It is not collapsed into the larger part.

About this page

Every figure is derived from Form N-PX, the filing in which registered funds disclose how they voted every proxy and institutional managers disclose their votes on executive pay (say-on-pay, say-on-frequency and golden parachutes). Figures are rebuilt weekly; this page was built on October 13, 2026. The interactive database shows the same votes company by company, including every individual fund.

First Trust proxy season coverage: 2023-2024 · 2024-2025 (this page) · 2025-2026.