Back in 2021, a survey came out from Goldman Sachs claiming that their analysts worked between 95 to 100 hours a week on average, and slept 5 hours per night.
The analysts in this survey said that most of them would quit in 6 months if nothing changes, and that both their mental and physical health had dropped by over 6 points on a 10 point scale since starting work at Goldman.
So are the hours in investment banking really that inhumane?
In this newsletter, I’m going to walk you through the actual hours you should expect to work in investment banking, and give you the real data so that you can make a more informed decision on whether investment banking is the right career for you.
So first let me just say — the Goldman survey was based on a sample size of 13 analysts, who all worked in the same group within Goldman.
In other words, it’s a very small group of analysts and it’s not very scientific to automatically assume that it’s a fair representation of everyone’s experience on Wall Street, whether it’s at other banks aside from Goldman or even just at other groups within Goldman.
Now if we want a more holistic view across the entire Street, we can look at these survey results from Wall Street Oasis users, which go back 3 years and across over 30 different investment banks.
If you look at these results, Goldman unsurprisingly is an outlier and at the top of the list in terms of hours worked — but even then the average is more like 87.5 hours a week, not the 95 to 100 stated in the smaller Goldman survey.
More importantly if you exclude Goldman, you can see that most investment banks average somewhere between 60 to 80 hours a week, which is in line with what we’ve seen here at Wall Street Mastermind when speaking with the hundreds of students we’ve placed into investment banking.
The way I would think about it is like a distribution curve:
80% of the time, you’re going to be in the middle part of the bell curve and working between 60 to 80 hours a week.
Then every now and then, you might have to work more than 80 hours — and this is where all of those 100+ hour work week horror stories come from.
But then there are also times when things will be very slow — for example during the end of the year between Christmas and New Years, when none of the clients are working, or during the summer when your clients and senior bankers are taking vacations with their families.
So what does a “good” week in investment banking where you’re only working 60 hours look like?
Well, we can break it down into three parts of the week: Monday to Thursday, Friday, and the weekend.
From Monday to Thursday, you might work for 12 hours a day, say from 10am to midnight, with two hour-long breaks in between for lunch and dinner.
So that brings you to 48 hours.
Then on Friday, you usually are able to get off work earlier and make plans with your friends.
So you might work from 10am to 8pm, and leave work after you’ve used up your dinner stipend.
Again factoring in the two hour-long breaks for meals, that’s 8 hours of work, bringing you up to 56 hours.
Then on Saturday, you might work at a bank that has protected weekends, where you’re not allowed to work unless it’s deemed absolutely necessary and an exception is submitted and approved at the senior level.
But on Sunday afternoon or evening, you end up having to put in a few hours of work as you respond to emails and start to ramp back up for the upcoming work week.
And that pretty much puts you at 60 hours a week.
All in all, not too bad right?
And even during the weekdays when you’re getting off work at midnight, you can probably be in bed by 1am or 2am after winding down and getting some personal time.
And you don’t have to wake up until around 9am in order to make it back into the office by 10am.
That’s still 7–8 hours of sleep a night, which is a pretty healthy range.
Or, if you have a question about anything I’m saying, feel free to drop a comment below and I will try my best to get back to every single one of you.
But OK now let’s look at a bad week, where you’re working on the higher side of 80 hours a week.
What would that look like?
From Monday to Thursday, you might work for 14 hours a day instead, leaving work at 2am instead of midnight.
That brings you to 56 hours.
Then on Friday, you still try your best to get off work earlier, but maybe that means leaving at 10pm instead of 8pm.
As long as you’re out by 10pm, you can still go out and hit the bars or the clubs with your friends, and blow off some steam.
So you worked 10 hours instead of 8, bringing you up to 66 hours on the week.
Then on Saturday, because you’re working on a live deal, which is why you’re pulling longer hours in the first place, the protected weekend policy is not applicable.
So you put in a good 7 hours of work from after lunch until the evening.
This is almost a full work day, which brings you up to 73 hours.
And on Sunday, it’s a repeat of Saturday, where you put in another 7 hours of work, bringing you up to 80 hours.
Now, all of these are just estimates for illustrative purposes, and of course the actual number of hours worked can change from day to day and week to week.
But even in the 80 hour work week scenario, you would probably spend a bit less time decompressing after work because it’s so late already and you’re so tired, which means you can still squeeze in approximately 6 hours of sleep per day between Monday to Thursday.
And then between Friday to Sunday, you would try to sleep in and catch up on your sleep debt.
Now at the end of the day, no matter how you slice or dice it, you should expect to be in the office for between 1.5x to 2x longer than your buddies who are not working in investment banking, since they’re only work 40 hours a week.
But most people who work in investment banking are willing to make this type of sacrifice for at least a year or two at the very beginning of their careers.
This is when they’re still young, are not married, don’t have kids, and have the stamina and physical health to be able to handle longer hours.
And in return, they get a lot of benefits for making these sacrifices:
They get the halo effect of the prestige that comes with working at these top-tier financial institutions, which stays on their resume forever.
They get to work with some really high caliber people both in terms of colleagues and clients, and they build an amazing professional network.
They get access to tremendous exit opportunities like private equity and hedge fund jobs that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
They get to work on the type of highly interesting and impactful transactions that you read about on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
And of course — they get compensated extremely well.
Speaking of the pay, one common rebuttal I often hear from detractors is that even though the pay is high, the hourly rate is really not that great when you factor in how many hours you have to work.
Some people even claim that you’re basically making minimum wage by working in investment banking.
In my honest opinion, this is a silly argument for many reasons, so let’s just break down the actual math with some hard facts:
A first-year analyst at a reputable investment bank will make $100,000 per year in base salary, on the low end.
Some firms will pay as high as $130,000 or even $140,000, but let’s just assume $100,000 to be conservative.
Then on top of that, you have a performance bonus at the end of the year that’s usually anywhere from 50 to 100% of your base salary.
So this means that your all-in compensation is somewhere between $150,000 to $200,000.
Again let’s assume the low end of that to be conservative, so say $150,000.
Then let’s assume you’re working 80 hours a week, which is the high end of the 60 to 80 hour range we’ve talked about.
Factoring in a little bit of time off for national holidays and one short vacation, let’s assume you work 50 weeks out of the year.
Working 80 hours a week for 50 weeks is 4,000 hours.
$150,000 divided by 4,000 is $37.50 per hour.
Now keep in mind — I used the most conservative estimate when it comes to pay, and I used the highest estimate when it comes to hours worked.
If I wanted to be more aggressive, I could also assume $200,000 in all-in compensation, and only 60 hours of work per week, or 3,000 hours per year.
Using these assumptions the high end of your implied hourly pay comes out to be $66.67 per hour.
So either way, you’re making somewhere between $37 per hour to $67 per hour in investment banking.
And this is as a first year analyst, when you’re at the bottom of the totem pole, when your pay is the lowest it’s ever going to be, and your hours are the longest you’ll ever have to work.
Compare that to the average college graduate today, who is working a normal 40-hour week.
The average salary for a college grad in the United States today is roughly $55,000.
40 hours a week for 50 weeks is 2,000 hours a year. $55,000 divided by 2,000 hours is $27.50 per hour.
So even then, you are making anywhere from 36% to 142% more per hour as a first year investment banking analyst, when compared to the average college grad who’s just starting out in a regular 9 to 5 job.
But that’s not all.
It’s not about how much you make in your first year — it should be about how much you make over the entirety of your career, which will likely be somewhere between 20–40 years, depending on how successful you are and how early you end up retiring.
Even if we just look at the first 7 years in investment banking, you could be making over half a million dollars per year by the time you become a vice president in banking.
That’s an average annual raise of $65,000 to $75,000 per year, for your first 7 years.
In other words it’s as if you’re getting a $5,000 raise every single month.
And all of this is happening as your hours are decreasing, because you’re becoming more senior, and you now have junior bankers under you who are staying late instead of you.
Instead of working 60 to 80 hours a week, now you’re only working between 50 to 60 hours a week.
So are the long hours in investment banking worth it? Well, only you can decide for yourself.
But either way, I hope this newsletter gave you a good look at the actual hours behind investment banking, instead of the sensationalized headlines you typically see in the news or in online forums.
Despite the long hours, investment banking is still one of the most competitive jobs you can try to go for because so many people want to break in each year.
This is why the top firms on average only accept between 1–3% of their applicants each year.
So if you would like more hands-on and personalized guidance with your recruiting process from our team of coaches that includes the former global heads of recruiting at top investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS, and Lehman Brothers, then please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
And as always — remember — Nothing worthwhile comes easy, and nothing is more important than your future.
Keep Grinding!
If you found this article to be valuable, please subscribe to our newsletter so that Linkedin will show you our future newsletters as well.
And as always — remember — Nothing worthwhile comes easy, and nothing is more important than your future. Keep Grinding!
If you’re someone who’s struggled to break into investment banking on your own but you’re still holding out hope, I hope I gave you more clarity on some of the different paths you might want to consider.
If you ever need help navigating through this complicated process — please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team here: wallstmastermind.com/apply
I’m a former Morgan Stanley banker, and my mission is to help our students land the highest-paying, most prestigious jobs on Wall Street.
My website: https://wallstmastermind.com/
✉️ Connect with me:
