2023 HYH Wall Street Compensation Survey

2023 High Yield Harry Compensation Report:

Welcome back! Time for one of my favorite newsletter pieces - Wall Street compensation data!!!

Normally, my posts are gated (which means you must be a subscriber to view, aka all you need to give beehiiv is your email for free), but it’s important everyone who needs this resource can see it. This is one of the few pieces I leave for everyone to see – mainly because 1) I want everyone to get paid and have salary/bonus visibility and 2) I greatly appreciate the contributions from everyone who helped.

I also want to take this time to note that I am not the only FinMeme account running compensation surveys. I want to set the record straight that I did start the annual compensation reports trend for anyone keeping score at home, but this is a good thing. The more datasets we have – the better picture the community can get. No gatekeeping – let’s get everyone fucking paid.

I created this compensation survey completely anonymously, meaning I can’t see who submitted what. Additionally, this data isn’t going to anyone else, it’s being used solely to provide compensation transparency.

Thank you to the 644 people (511 Americans) who contributed to this survey. Without you, this isn’t possible.

Additionally, unlike other surveys, I did not poll on “what firm do you work at?”. I just think it’s way too easy for someone’s anonymity to be ruined if I do that. But if you want to try to understand firm-specific data this H-1B Visa data site is immensely helpful. You can see base compensation levels for anyone with an H-1B Visa. For example, I was able to search that a Credit AVP at Blackstone is making a $120k base salary and that an Apollo Associate is making a $150k base salary.

Some Notes before the data:

Each result has at least five datapoints, so if it wasn’t incorporated then I didn’t have enough datapoints.

For the sake of this compensation survey, I elected to leave out the carried interest part of the survey. This is just a messy area to try to build a range on given varying practices by firms, different fund sizes, the uncertainty related to when you can realize the carry, and the different types of deferred compensation structures by firms. Next year, I will figure out a better way to lay out what the street is seeing. The general trend I noticed (across buyside shops) is that carry goes to every VP and up (makes sense to align with the fund), the majority of senior associates have a form of carry, and some associates get a fractional bit of carry.

I didn’t have enough data for a ton of international comp data – I’m sorry guys, just not going to get enough data for every country and this is a US based account. The only international data that had more than 5 datapoints per item was some data for London. All US data is in USD, ofc.

Here’s the results. Only issue, is I hope the photos show up okay and apologies if they don’t. Respectfully, beehiiv (this newsletter platform) needs to work on getting photos/pics to show better on this app. It’s not as good as it would look on a deck, but hope it’s okay for you guys.

Private Equity: Let’s start with the PE bros. I was very kind to the PE bros (I’m your favorite lender right ladies & gents?) and split up PE data by 1) all of the US, 2) NYC PE, 3) Megafund PE, 4) Middle Market (MM) PE, 5) Lower Middle Market (LMM) PE, and 6) U.S. PE excluding NYC. I received 68 submissions from PE professionals. Results came in as expected with larger funds making more and NYC junior staff making more than other U.S. peers. See below.

U.S. Private Equity: 

NYC Private Equity: