How Much Your Wall Street Bonus Is Really Worth

Picture this: It’s Wall Street bonus season. The year is 2022. A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. trader is handed $100,000 in deferred stock. Her uptown rival at Bank of America Corp. is given an identical award on the very same day.

Now, three years on those awards have fully vested with wildly divergent results: The Goldman staffer would have been able to clear more than $113,000. The Bank of America trader, though, would have netted less than $83,000.

Such is the uncertainty that comes with one of Wall Street’s favorite forms of compensation: The value of a bonus at the time of the award often ends up being far different than what bankers are actually able to cash out several years on. A jarring reminder of the unpredictability of these stock payouts came in 2023, when the collapse of Credit Suisse triggered the biggest wealth-destruction event for bankers in recent history.

Ever since the global financial crisis, in an attempt to align pay to shareholder returns, banks have relied more heavily on restricted stock units when they’re handing out bonuses. Now, as the 2025 compensation season gathers steam, Bloomberg News crunched the numbers for 12 of the world’s biggest lenders, examining the value of their bonus currency over the years to help demystify the awards.

On average, the analysis shows that the awards given out by US banks ended up being more valuable than those from their European counterparts in the 16 years since the global financial crisis — but that gap is closing. Morgan Stanley had the most valuable bonus currency during that period followed closely by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Excluding the now-defunct Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG’s awards were the least valuable among the large global banks Bloomberg analyzed.

Within the American banks, though, Citigroup Inc.’s bonuses were worth the least on average, according to the data.

“When you get paid in restricted stock, it’s like being handed a scratch-off ticket that takes three to five years to scratch,” said Craig Coben, a veteran investment banker who was one of Bank of America’s most senior capital markets executives until he retired in 2022. “These stock-based bonuses can be a double-edged sword where you don’t know whether to rejoice or cry until years later.”

To compare banks, the analysis assumes they each made $100,000 grants annually on Jan. 1, which then vested by thirds on the next three anniversaries, a common structure on Wall Street. The analysis calculates the total value of those shares if they were sold as soon as they vested.

High finance remains one of the best paid industries around, with securities industry employees in New York City making an average bonus of about $161,000 in the 16 years from 2008, according to data from the state’s comptroller.

For the best rainmakers and traders, bonuses can stretch into millions of dollars and are often many multiples of their annual salaries. That’s unless they’re in the European Union, where their bonuses are capped at twice their yearly fixed pay.

Restricted stock is one of the things that determine how easily banks retain that top talent. A few years of poor share performance means a once high-performing trading desk can quickly turn into a revolving door.

Many industries rely on restricted stock to reward high performers, but compensation season on Wall Street can feel like a bloodsport to the rainmakers and traders vying for a bigger slice of the bonus pie. Financiers often spend months banking on their bonuses to pay for elite private schools, luxury vacation homes and private-club memberships.

It’s hard to ignore the diverging fortunes of traders and bankers at European lenders compared with their peers in the US. After Deutsche Bank (and Credit Suisse) the two banks with the least valuable bonus currencies since the crisis were Barclays Plc and HSBC Holdings Plc.

In the 16 years after the financial crisis, Deutsche Bank staffers’ actual payouts would have been less than the amounts they were promised in their annual compensation statements more than half the time. It’s no wonder, then, that the company’s yearly bonus announcement became known as DOLF, or “day of long faces,” for the disappointment it would typically cause workers.

For instance, a Deutsche Bank trader awarded $100,000 on Jan. 1, 2018, would have cashed out with just $46,628 if they’d sold at their first opportunity. (Again, that assumes equal vesting in 2019, 2020 and 2021.) A trader awarded that same amount at JPMorgan would have cleared $113,487, more than double what his colleague across the pond hauled in.

But those who hung in through the share slump were rewarded by a subsequent rebound. A Deutsche Bank staffer granted a $100,000 bonus by the lender just four years later would have ultimately received roughly the same amount as someone at Goldman Sachs or Wells Fargo & Co. In fact, Deutsche Bank staffers in 2022 also made out better than those at Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.

“At some European banks, the fancy bonus number you were given turned out to be written in disappearing ink,” Coben said. “That’s a source of immense frustration for the bankers involved.”

It’s not always easy to predict which banks will offer the best outcome.

In what may seem counterintuitive to some industry watchers, the most valuable award for a single year since the crisis was Bank of America’s 2012 award, where every $100,000 was worth $270,204 by the time it vested.

That’s thanks to Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan’s massive turnaround and share price surge at the lender that nearly collapsed during the financial crisis.

Stable banks, like JPMorgan, often already have strong valuations, which could limit future upside. Banks with lower valuations to begin with — like Citigroup — can be a better bet because their stock has the potential to go on a tear.

But even companies considered relatively stable can be hit by sudden, unexpected events. Consider, for instance, the fate of traders at Canada’s Toronto-Dominion Bank, where the stock plummeted in October after it agreed to pay almost $3.1 billion in fines to settle a money-laundering scandal. The shares remains about 15% down from the peak they reached three years ago.

Bankers rarely consider the possible deviations in what their bonus would ultimately be worth when deciding to jump ship from one firm to another.

Such thinking is “most likely” something that only occurs to bankers after the fact, said Maeve McDonald, who leads the European investment banking franchise at the recruiter Selby Jennings. “This is not necessarily always a premeditated decision.”

Up and down Wall Street, managers are in the midst of handing out bonus decisions to legions of their staffers.

Moods are high. Goldman recently awarded an eye-watering $80 million to firm President John Waldron in a bid to convince him to stick around for another few years. Staffers at Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are expecting some of their biggest bonus increases since the pandemic. And bank stocks on both sides of the Atlantic surged in 2024, meaning past awards should be sitting pretty.

But Wall Street veterans remember how crises can swing award values in drastic ways.

In December 2008, Goldman Sachs gave top performers $500 million of stock options to give them incentive to stick around through the tough times. By the time executives were able to exercise the options, they were worth over $3 billion. Meanwhile, Credit Suisse had planned for a similar move in early 2023 and weighed giving out $380 million in special awards to its top 500 performers.

Any such awards would have been worthless a month later.