When you earn $2.7m at Jane Street, you may find it is paid like this
In case you missed the news, Jane Street pays well. Last month, we suggested it might pay each of its 3,500 people $2.3m each.
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It turns out we were wrong. Late Friday, shortly before the UK bank holiday, Bloomberg reported that Jane Street actually paid its people $2.7m each for 2025. That's not bad given that most of them don't even know what their individual PnL is.
How can Jane Street, an electronic trading firm, afford to pay so generously? Theories abound, not all of them favorable, but one important thing to remember is that Jane Street is not just an electronic trading firm. It is also a Venture Capital firm, with investments in the likes of Anthropic and CoreWeave. Last year, the value of its Anthropic investment rose by over $800m in the third quarter alone.
If you earn $2.7m at Jane Street, therefore, you may find that you are partly paid in carried interest. Jane Street isn't commenting, but a current job vacancy at the firm for a compensation specialist to work on paying Jane Street's own staff, says the ideal candidate needs to know about "buyout valuations." He or she also needs to know about other "long term incentive structures," including restricted stock units (RSUs). Jane Street is privately owned, but the implication is that employees are locked-in with non-publicly traded stock. Not all the compensation there is cash. This helps when you don't impose non-competes on staff who leave.
Jane Street isn't a public company. It doesn't file global public accounts and it is not obliged to explain its compensation strategy.
However, it does file regional accounts. The most recent of these, for Jane Street UK Partnership LLP in London, said that six "members" at the firm shared $1.2bn of profits in London in 2024. $1.1bn of those profits went to a single unnamed corporate entity, however. The other 688 human employees, who were split between tech, trading and infrastructure (286: 226: 176) shared $753m in salaries and bonuses, or an average of $1.1m each. In London in 2024, this all seemed to be cash.
Times have changed. The new figures suggest that working for Jane Street globally has since become more lucrative. It also seems to involve being locked-in with RSUs.
Jane Street insiders may still not understand how their high pay is arrived at. Compensation at Jane Street is the result of "complex formulas" according to the job description for its new compensation specialist. There are "regionalization" adjustments. On this basis, Jane Street's Indian traders may be earning less than the rest. And $2.7m may be cheap for its traders in New York City, who are probably only too happy to submit to deferrals. In some cases, it's thought that they also get to invest in Jane Street's own funds and that these investments endure after they leave - as long as they don't join a competitor firm.
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