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First Trust proxy voting record, 2025-2026

First Trust reported 216,028 proxy votes on Form N-PX for the 2026 season. On the 162,348 ballot items the board itself put forward — directors, pay, the auditor, capital — it voted FOR 92.9% of the time. On the 2,714 environmental and social proposals put on the ballot by shareholders, it voted FOR 1.4% of the time.

2023-20242024-20252025-2026

On the board’s own proposals

92.9% FOR of 162,348 fund votes on board proposals in 2025-2026: directors, pay, auditor, capital.

FOR 150,753 AGAINST 7,811 Abstained or withheld 3,784

How we count these

On proposals shareholders put on the ballot

1.4% FOR of 2,714 fund votes on environmental and social proposals shareholders put on the ballot. The board opposed 2,704.

FOR 38 AGAINST 2,676 Abstained 0

See the 38 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, 2025-2026. “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 typePut on the ballot by ItemsDecided Voted FORVoted AGAINST Abstained / withheld
Director Elections Board (568 inferred) 107,058 102,105 97.0% 3.0% 3,787
Director Elections Shareholders (16 inferred) 28 22 22.7% 77.3% 6
Corporate Governance Board 21,696 21,164 94.2% 5.8% 179
Corporate Governance Shareholders (37 inferred) 3,072 3,042 57.4% 42.6% 14
Say-on-Pay Board (50 inferred) 17,545 16,004 90.3% 9.7% 0
Say-on-Pay Shareholders (22 inferred) 23 23 95.7% 4.3% 0
Audit-related Board 15,774 15,670 98.7% 1.3% 0
Audit-related Shareholders (18 inferred) 157 143 74.1% 25.9% 9
Compensation Board (145 inferred) 13,217 13,041 83.5% 16.5% 49
Compensation Shareholders (16 inferred) 264 246 37.0% 63.0% 0
Capital Structure Board 11,231 11,127 92.1% 7.9% 0
Capital Structure Shareholders (3 inferred) 187 187 85.0% 15.0% 0
Other Board 2,422 2,359 94.5% 5.5% 30
Other Shareholders (1 inferred) 189 187 29.4% 70.6% 1
Other Social Issues Board 624 599 95.2% 4.8% 0
Other Social Issues Shareholders 1,942 1,940 1.2% 98.8% 0
Environment or Climate Board 322 305 100.0% 0.0% 0
Environment or Climate Shareholders 1,398 1,398 0.1% 99.9% 0
Extraordinary Transactions Board 1,458 1,444 86.1% 13.9% 0
Extraordinary Transactions Shareholders 21 17 17.6% 82.4% 1
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Board 283 266 100.0% 0.0% 0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Shareholders 683 683 0.0% 100.0% 0
Human Rights or Human Capital/workforce Board 283 266 100.0% 0.0% 0
Human Rights or Human Capital/workforce Shareholders 592 592 2.0% 98.0% 0
Shareholder Rights and Defenses Board 378 331 93.7% 6.3% 39
Shareholder Rights and Defenses Shareholders (3 inferred) 274 274 65.0% 35.0% 0
Investment Company Matters Board 14 7 100.0% 0.0% 0
Investment Company Matters Shareholders 5 5 100.0% 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 (879 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 (4,455 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 216,028 vote records for 2025-2026; after removing votes filed twice in different N-PX filings, that is 193,852 ballot items (fund-level observations) across 7,151 issuer names and 186 funds. They cover 57,027 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.
3,439 items are outside both headline figures.
Besides the table rows neither figure uses:
ExcludedItemsWhy
Not voted0 Reported as not voted, take no action or do not vote. No position was expressed, so there is nothing to count.
Other ballot type2,161 Frequency ballots (one / two / three years) and anything else that is not a FOR, AGAINST, abstention or withhold.
Direction indeterminate12 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 vote1,266 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 · 2025-2026 (this page).