USA Banking & Finance Industry Salary Report 2026

On disclosed postings, role medians span from $46,800 for personal bankers to $130,000 for investment analysts, a spread of about 178%. Roles closer to revenue or capital decisions pay more: investment analysts sit roughly 73% above compliance analysts at $75,000, while financial planners and loan officers cluster near $120,000 and a technical middle tier of quantitative analysts ($104,000) and FP&A analysts ($100,000) follows. Because the feed carries no posting count per role, treat the exact ordering as directional.

On web-sourced state data, Washington shows the highest median at $106,000, only about 3% above New York at $103,000, so the top of the table is tight. New York, long the anchor of United States finance pay, sits second. Florida is lowest among ranked states at $70,000. Among cities, Seattle and San Francisco lead near $112,000 and $111,000. These geographic figures are web-sourced estimates without per-area posting counts, so read them as directional rather than definitive.

Median posted pay was highest in February ($90,000) and eased to about $72,275 by June. The movement reflects the changing mix of roles posted through the year rather than any change to pay itself: earlier months carried more senior and specialized openings, mid-year months more volume analyst hiring. The January figure rests on too few disclosed salaries to be reliable, so it is suppressed.

Beneath the headline numbers the market is candidate-deep but fast moving. Glozo data shows roughly 71 candidates in the pool for every open vacancy, drawn from about 152,000 banking and finance candidates, yet the average listing stays live only about 8.4 days. Personal banker postings run longest at about 12.9 days, while wealth advisor postings clear fastest at about 6.8 days. The result is two markets at once: ample supply for generalist roles, and real scarcity for credit, risk, and quantitative expertise.

The mix is overwhelmingly permanent. Full-time roles account for about 93% of postings, with contract work near 5% and the remainder split across part-time, internship, and temporary. A mix this weighted toward full-time points to employers investing in stable, long-tenure staff rather than a contingent posture.

Among the skills measured, the largest pay premiums attach to portfolio management, about 38% over the industry median, credit analysis at about 29%, and machine learning at about 28%. The thread is consistent: skills at the intersection of financial judgment and modern analytics command the clearest premium, while broadly held tooling adds little, with Power BI showing under 1% here.

The candidate pool is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in the specialist tier, about 66% of candidates, with a sizable expert layer near 28%, while entry and leadership candidates are thin, around 4% and 2%. For employers that means ample mid-career supply but real competition for proven leaders.

This benchmark comes entirely from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not Glozo postings, and covers the management, business, and financial operations occupation group rather than banking alone. Within that group, women's median earnings are about 18% below men's, a gap modestly narrower than the national figure across all occupations of about 19%. Both figures come from the same BLS release, so the comparison is like for like.