The $472,500 question: Which Wall Street bank should you work for? (2024)

If you work in investment banking or sales and trading, you may think you've made it on Wall Street.

But does a front-office job at any old bank really mean you've made it?

It turns out your pay varies a lot based on whether you're working at a top-tier or second-tier bank.

On Tuesday we showed you the average salaries and bonuses of front-office financiers in the US.

We found that, on average, annual compensation ranged from about $95,000 for analysts to up to $722,000 for managing directors.

To see how those numbers break down across Wall Street banks, we reached out to Emolument, a salary-benchmarking website.

Emolument split 20 major banks into Tier 1 and Tier 2 categories based on what the banks paid their New York City-based employees. The data is crowdsourced from 1,853 responses.

In Tier 1, they included in descending order Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup and Credit Suisse (tie), Barclays, and UBS.

Tier 2, ranked in descending order, contains HSBC, Nomura Holdings, RBC, BNP Paribas, RBS, TD Securities, Wells Fargo, Lazard, Jefferies, Société Générale, and BMO.

Here's how the two groups stack up:

At the top banks, managing directors make on average $1 million a year.

But at the second-tier banks, MD pay averages around $530,000:

Even at the entry level, the difference is pretty noticeable. Analyst bonuses at top banks are, on average, three times as much as those at second-tier banks.

And the difference grows almost exponentially from there.

Directors at top banks make, on average, $115,000 more than their counterparts at the second group of banks. For managing directors, the difference is around $472,500.

Here's that difference one more time:

The difference extends all the way to the top. Last year, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein raked in about $22 million for the year.

Meanwhile, Bill Downe, CEO of Tier-2 bank BMO Capital Markets, earned CAD $9.94 million.