2024 Wall Street Compensation Survey

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Welcome back - it’s time for my annual compensation survey!

Normally my posts are gated for free subscribers only, but it’s important everyone who needs this resource can see it. I greatly appreciate the contributions from everyone who helped. This is an important way to provide salary and bonus transparency. After starting the first finmeme anonymous compensation survey a couple years back, it’s good that this has broadly caught steam among other accounts and that there’s a growing number of datasets out there.

Thank you to the 930 people who contributed to this survey. Without you, this isn’t possible.

If you want to try to understand firm specific data, then I recommend the H-1B Visa data site as an immensely helpful way to view base compensation levels for anyone with an H-1B Visa. Just search for a big shop or bank and you’ll certainly get some base level data.

Some Notes before the data:

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

Big changes from last year included 1) More details around carried interest bps allocated by PE funds 2) Breaking out “Opportunistic Credit” from “Performing Credit” 3) Adding a “75th Percentile” section for Comp and Hours. The only pushback from last year were some “this looks low” replies so adding 75th percentile data where available shows a closer look at what top performers may earn and how much longer some Associates are working than others. Secondly, as many of you are aware, deal flow isn’t great, so frankly these hours may be lower than historical times when M&A was robust.

I didn’t have enough data for international comp data – I’m sorry guys, I’m just not going to get enough data for every country and this is an U.S. based account. For London and Canada I had a lot of instances where there were only 4 submissions per segment, which frankly just isn’t enough to draw conclusions from.

Lastly, these charts should read fine on a web browser, but if you’re on mobile you probably want to move your phone sideways.

Here’s the results:

Direct Lending: Let’s start with the golden age. I received 202 submissions from U.S. direct lending professionals. Thank you to Unstructured Capital for helping rally participation. Overall, the solid comp among private credit professionals reinforces all the golden age memes. I sliced the data up several ways: 1) The U.S., 2) NYC, 3) The U.S. excluding NYC, 4) the lower middle market (LMM), 5) the middle market (MM), and 6) the Upper Middle Market (UMM)/Megafunds. The results showed that NYC professionals make the most and that larger strategies/funds make more; which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise.

Please see below.

U.S. Direct Lending:

NYC Direct Lending: