The best paid people in banking are younger than you imagine
It’s well known that in financial services (or any career besides sports, really) you get the best years of your professional life at the end of your career, when you have the most experience and biggest network to exploit. Recent research, however, suggests something very different.
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The research is courtesy of our compensation & lifestyle survey, which we hosted across Q1 of this year, and informed our Compensation & Lifestyle Report 2026. We surveyed nearly 3,000 financial services professionals in our survey. The figures posted below were not published in our report, and are only available here.
As the table shows, the most significant compensation increases, which were driven by increased bonus payments, were for young people – those under 30. At this age, most respondents to our survey were analysts and associates, and were also likely to be recently promoted. Generally, promotions are more likely to be regular at this age - every three or so years, approximately - and this by itself can lead to a 50%+ increase in compensation year on year.
The lowest changes were for professionals over the age of 45, and especially those over the age of 50. There were a few reasons for this, such as professionals being less likely to move jobs late into their careers and being less likely to have guaranteed bonus increases due to promotions.
What was more interesting about the results was that those over 50 did not have the highest overall compensation in financial services. Although this might seem surprising on the face of it, it was a trend that we had noticed in previous years, too.
Historically, we've found that compensation often peaked for professionals who were in their 40s. This year, however, the peak was sooner – financial services professionals in their 30s, and especially their early 30s, out-earned their peers across the board, and earned over $425k on average.
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