The average hedge fund professional earns way more than you, works way less
Everyone knows that working at a hedge fund is the holy grail of financial services jobs. Great pay, more relaxed working hours – what’s not to like? Well, not everyone working at a hedge fund is happy. The reasons can be quite tragic.
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Our 2025 Compensation & Lifestyle report received over 2,500 responses from professionals in the financial services sector, including those working in hedge funds. The pulse check on the industry was almost unanimously a positive one.
By a country mile, hedge professionals were the best paid people in our report. They earned compensation of $631k on average across the year, almost twice as much as even revenue-generating front-office roles in banks such as investment banking and sales & trading, where respondents earned $360k and $384k on average.
The real advantage to working at a hedge fund however, on top of the huge pay, is the working hours. Our respondents in investment banking worked 60-hour weeks on average in 2024, while our respondents in sales & trading clocked more reasonable 54-hour weeks, on average. But hedge fund respondents worked – somehow – for just 51 hours a week on average.
Compounded, this meant that average pay per hour was huge. The average hedge fund professional worked for $237 per hour across 2024. Within the industry, depending on seniority, this ranged from $86/hour for analyst-equivalents to $801/hour for managing director-equivalents (usually portfolio managers). The latter earned average bonuses of $1.8m and worked less than 50 hours per week.
Still, not everybody in a hedge fund is happy. “I work the night shift,” one San Francisco-based analyst said. “But the work hours are not strict.” He also noted that he only had three days of holiday a year, and his firm had a disappointingly small gym. Spare him a thought.
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