Wall Street bonuses reach record high in 2025, to an average of $246,900 per employee

The average bonus for a Wall Street employee hit a record of $246,900 last year, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, which could lead to greater spending on the East End.

The total bonus pool rose 9%, to $49.2 billion, compared to 2024, which the comptroller attributed to strong trading activity and the fees that securities firms charged clients.

"Wall Street saw strong performance for much of last year, despite all of the ongoing domestic and international upheavals," DiNapoli said in a statement.

The comptroller is scheduled to release his annual report on Wall Street bonuses on Thursday.

Real estate professionals said higher Wall Street bonuses can help boost the East End’s luxury real estate market. But DiNapoli said slowing job growth and international conflicts could put a damper on Wall Street’s payday in 2026. The Trump administration’s war in Iran has resulted in wild swings in the stock market, plus higher oil and gas prices.

"We are seeing slower job growth, and geopolitical conflicts have global repercussions that pose extraordinary risks for the short- and long-term outlook on the financial sector and for broader economic markets," he said.

Roughly 198,200 people worked in the securities industry in New York City in 2025 — a slight drop from a 30-year employment high in 2024 — though the comptroller expects that number to rise when his office collects additional data.

A strong year on Wall Street can encourage those employees to buy and rent luxury homes, said Martha Gundersen, an associate real estate broker at Douglas Elliman.

"If the bonuses go up, the activity will go up, particularly in high-end rentals, but also in sales," Gundersen said. "The first thing a real estate broker does is look at how bonuses are, and then predict how well they're going to do that year."

Bonus money can speed up a would-be-buyer’s timeline if they were already looking, said Bridget Elkin, a real estate agent with Compass. But it's "not the whole story," she added.

"Bonuses don’t create buyers," Elkin said. "But they give those in the market a sizable nudge."

The number of luxury homes for sale, their prices, and a buyer’s own motivations are bigger factors, Elkin said. And not every luxury buyer is a financial service worker, she noted.

Roughly 17.9% of U.S. securities jobs were located in New York City in 2024 — down from about one-third of those jobs in 1990, according to the comptroller. Other industries have grown in New York, such as education and health, the state’s largest employment sector as of the end of 2025, and professional and business services, according to the state Department of Labor.

Wealthy Wall Street workers also increase consumer spending on luxury goods, as well as on areas such as restaurants and private schools, said Juan Carlos Conesa, co-chair of the economics department at Stony Brook University.

But that spending doesn’t change drastically with a bigger bonus, because securities employees factor it into their annual spending.

"Those people who work on Wall Street, they understand that every year, they're going to have a bonus, so they already incorporate that bonus into their expenditure patterns," Conesa said. "It's not like winning a lottery and all of a sudden you have $200,000 that you didn't expect to have."