Investment Banker Salary 2026: Pay From Analyst to MD

A first-year investment banking analyst at a large New York bank earns roughly $165,000 to $225,000 in total pay (base plus bonus), and a managing director earns $1 million to $2 million or more, according to the Mergers & Inquisitions 2026 compensation report, which covers bonuses paid for 2025. Base salaries are the more certain part: in 2025 H-1B filings I pulled, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Jefferies, UBS and RBC listed New York investment banking analysts at $110,000 to $125,000 and associates at $150,000 to $225,000.

The rest of this page breaks pay down by level, converts it to monthly and hourly figures, shows what federal wage data says by state, and lists the base salaries banks themselves reported to the Department of Labor.

Investment banker salary by level, 2026

The table below uses the Mergers & Inquisitions (M&I) 2026 report, which states its ranges reflect roughly the 25th to 75th percentile of front-office, New York pay at large banks, based on year-end 2025 bonuses. M&I publishes one range per title. It does not split Analyst or Associate pay by class year, so I have not invented year-by-year numbers. Where year-specific data exists, I note it below the table.

Source: Mergers & Inquisitions, 2026 Investment Banker Salary and Bonus Report (year-end 2025 bonuses). Base and total are as published. The bonus column is my subtraction of the low base from the low total and the high base from the high total, so treat it as an approximation, not a reported figure.

What I could find on year-level differences:

• Analyst 1 vs. Analyst 2 base. In 2025 H-1B filings for New York "Investment Banking Analyst" roles, bulge bracket and large banks cluster at exactly two numbers, $110,000 and $125,000 (DOL LCA data via h1bdata.info, 2025 filings). That matches the common first-year and second-year base steps, but the filings do not state class year, so I cannot confirm which filing is which.
• Year-specific bonuses. M&I reports top-ranked first-year analysts at some elite boutiques earning about $180,000 to $195,000 all in, and second-year analysts at elite boutiques reaching about $250,000. It also reports third-year associate bonuses of $110,000 to $150,000 at Bank of America versus $200,000 to $300,000+ at most other banks.
• Self-reported numbers. In the Wall Street Oasis 2026 analyst bonus thread (opened May 29, 2026, consolidated August 9, 2026), anonymous posters reported Bank of America first-year top-bucket pay of $110,000 base plus $95,000 bonus, and second-year top bucket of $125,000 base plus $115,000 bonus. These are unverified forum posts, and I include them only because they line up with the H-1B base steps.

How much do investment bankers make per month and per hour?

Divide the M&I totals by 12 for monthly pay. Hourly pay depends entirely on the hours you assume, so I show two cases:

• 80 hours a week, 50 weeks a year = 4,000 hours. I use 80 because it is the weekly threshold banks themselves cite: Axios reported on September 12, 2024 that JPMorgan began considering an 80-hour weekly limit for junior bankers in August 2024, and that Bank of America moved junior bankers to daily hour logging so managers can see when someone approaches 80 hours.
• 40 hours a week, 52 weeks = 2,080 hours. The standard full-time year, shown only for comparison.

Monthly and hourly figures are my arithmetic on M&I's 2026 ranges. Pre-tax. Bonuses are paid once a year, so actual monthly paychecks for an analyst reflect only the base: $110,000 / 12 is about $9,167 a month.

The takeaway: at 80 hours a week, a first-year analyst's effective hourly rate is in the $40s and $50s, which is why the money looks very different per hour than per year. Senior bankers rarely log analyst hours, so the 4,000-hour column overstates their time.

Entry level investment banker salary

Every source I checked puts entry-level pay above $100,000, but they measure different things:

ZipRecruiter's figure has moved since the brief for this page was written: it now reports $118,333, with most listings between $107,500 and $123,500. Job-board averages include small regional firms and postings that are not true analyst seats, which is why they sit below what the large banks file with the DOL.

If you are comparing banking with tech, our AI salary database and OpenAI salary breakdown show where new-graduate pay at AI labs now lands.

The H-1B table: base salaries banks reported to the government

This is the part other salary pages skip. When a US employer sponsors an H-1B worker, it files a Labor Condition Application (LCA) with the Department of Labor that states the job title, location and offered wage. The DOL publishes these filings. I searched them through h1bdata.info, which republishes the DOL disclosure data, for 2025 filings. I did not download the raw DOL disclosure files myself.

Source: DOL H-1B LCA disclosure data as republished by h1bdata.info, filings submitted in 2025, searched October 16, 2026. Figures are offered base salary only; LCAs do not report bonus. For Evercore and PJT, I used only generic titles and excluded filings labeled research, legal, technology or hedge fund, but the generic titles do not name the division.

Three things stand out. First, analyst base pay is close to standardized: across 37 New York "Investment Banking Analyst" filings in 2025, every large bank filed at $110,000 or $125,000. Second, the LCA bases match M&I's published ranges almost exactly, which gives me more confidence in M&I's base figures than in job-board averages. Third, base pay alone cannot explain the gap between a $225,000 associate and a $500,000 one. That difference is the bonus, and no public filing discloses it by title.

Investment banker salary by state

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have an "investment banker" category. Its Occupational Outlook Handbook places investment bankers inside SOC 41-3031, Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents, alongside brokers and financial services sales staff. That is why BLS figures look far lower than the bank data above.

Nationally, the BLS reports a median annual wage of $78,660 for this occupation in May 2025, and $103,030 for those working in the securities, commodity contracts and other financial investments industry.

Source: BLS OEWS May 2025. The national median is from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. State figures are from Wagedex, which republishes the BLS OEWS May 2025 release; the BLS state tables would not load for me, so I could not open them directly. I cross-checked the national median ($78,660) against BLS, and it matches.

New York is the outlier, more than double the national median, because that is where most front-office investment banking jobs sit. Read this table as a ranking of where the higher-paid securities jobs cluster, not as a measure of investment banker pay.

Bulge bracket vs. elite boutique pay

I only compare where pay is published. At the analyst base level, the two tiers are nearly identical. The 2025 LCA filings show bulge brackets (Citi, JPMorgan, UBS) at $110,000 to $125,000 and elite boutiques (Lazard, Moelis, PJT, Evercore, Centerview) at $110,000 to $135,000. At the associate level, elite boutiques filed $175,000 to $225,000, the same band as JPMorgan and Jefferies.

The difference is in bonuses, per M&I's 2026 report:

• Elite boutiques pay higher bonuses mostly at the Associate level and above. M&I says Perella Weinberg and Centerview reportedly pay Associates $50,000 to $100,000+ above its quoted ranges, and pay those bonuses entirely in cash.
• At the Analyst level the gap is smaller. Lazard, Evercore, Moelis and PWP reportedly pay top-ranked first-year analysts roughly bulge bracket levels.
• Individual banks matter more than tier. M&I reports Bank of America paying mid-level bankers poorly and UBS paying them more.

For a bank-level reality check, I opened Goldman Sachs's full-year 2025 earnings release. Goldman reported $18.906 billion in compensation and benefits expense and 47,400 employees at year-end 2025, which works out to about $398,900 per employee. That average covers every Goldman employee, not just bankers, so it is context, not a banker salary.

Is investment banking hard, and is 25 too old to start?

The hours are the hard part. The fact that two of the largest US banks were, as of September 2024, building systems to flag junior bankers approaching 80 hours a week (Axios, September 12, 2024) tells you that 80 hours is a real number, not an exaggeration.

On age: Mergers & Inquisitions' article on age in investment banking gives an estimated analyst cut-off of 25, but adds that it may be more like 27 to 28 depending on when you started the degree. M&I treats age as a proxy for work experience: with more than two or three years of full-time post-university work, analyst roles become very difficult. For associates, who usually enter after an MBA, M&I says most are under 30 and the upper limit is probably closer to 35. So 25 is not too old, but it is the age where you should be targeting analyst roles now or planning the MBA route instead.

Is a 3.6 GPA bad for investment banking?

No. Wall Street Oasis's GPA guidance says candidates from target or semi-target schools should aim for 3.5 or higher to be safe at GPA screens, calls anything above 3.5 "good," and anything above 3.7 "impressive." It also notes cutoffs "vary widely by company, and even more so by interviewer." A 3.6 clears the common 3.5 screen. Below 3.5, the same page says strong internships can offset it but you should not count on them. There is no public, bank-published GPA cutoff, so treat any single number as a rule of thumb.

What the top-ranking salary sites say (re-checked October 16, 2026)

These spread from about $118,000 to $361,000 because they mix titles, firm sizes and pay components. None of them is wrong; they are answering different questions. The level table at the top of this page is the more useful answer. For where a senior MD's pay places them nationally, see what it takes to be in the top 1 percent by net worth.

Method and sources

What I did for this page, on October 16, 2026:

• I opened the Mergers & Inquisitions 2026 compensation report and took its title-level base and total ranges as published. I derived the bonus, monthly and hourly columns myself and labeled them as such.
• I searched 2025 H-1B LCA filings on h1bdata.info for "investment banking analyst," "investment banking associate," "investment banking vice president" and "investment banking director" in New York, and by employer for Evercore, Moelis, Centerview and PJT Partners. A 2026 year filter on the site returned an unfiltered multi-year list, so I used only 2025 filings.
• I took national BLS OEWS May 2025 figures from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. BLS state tables would not load for me, so state medians come from Wagedex's republication of the same May 2025 release. I could not get a May 2025 state employment figure for New York.
• I opened Goldman Sachs's Q4 2025 earnings release for compensation expense and headcount.
• I re-checked Indeed, Levels.fyi, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter on October 16, 2026.

What is not public: bank bonus pools by title, individual bonuses, and any bank's official GPA cutoff. Analyst and associate pay split by class year is not published by M&I or by the banks; the only year-level figures I found are the M&I examples and the anonymous Wall Street Oasis posts noted above.