Quant Salary Guide 2025: How Much Do Quant Traders & Researchers Earn?

Quant Salaries at top firms like Citadel, Jane Street, and SIG explained.

By the end of this post, we'll see how top notch Quants can actually out earn Mr. Dimon himself.

First things first though.

Details of quant compensation, especially at the higher end, on public databases like glassdoor are just flat out wrong.

It's wrong b/c well, the #1 rule of PM-club is…you don't talk about PM-club.

Portfolio Manager Salary at Top Hedge Funds (Jane Street, Citadel, Point72, Millennium)

Before diving in, PMs are the more “senior” roles in the quant space. You typically need around 5-10+ years of experience to get a PM seat. We'll cover more junior compensation another time but even as a beginner it's good to understand where you're headed.

There are 2 components to PM compensation:

1. Base Salary +
2. PnL Cut (“Bonus”)

Quant Base Salary Range

The Base Salary is a pretty standard number around $150-250k / year.

Solid salary, but it's really the boring part of compensation.

I wouldn't worry about it or negotiate over it too hard.

And interestingly, it doesn't really grow too much over your career. Meaning whether you have 10 or 30 years of experience, the base salary caps out at around $250k.

All the real action happens in the PnL Cut.

Quant Bonus Structure: PnL Cut Explained

This is the annual bonus, usually paid out in February of the following year.

It's calculated as a percent of the trading profits you made during the year: (Your % Cut)*(Your Trading Profits During Year).

So 2 numbers matter here.

Let's start with the % Cut.

This number, unlike base salary, actually can change meaningfully during your career.

Typically, if you're a newer PM, the cut will be around 5-10%. For more senior PMs, however, the cut can be as large as 20%.

20%/5%=4x is decently meaningful

..but even more so when you consider the second part of the equation, trading profits.

Trading profits are clearly highly dependent on the PM and can be further decomposed as: (GMV)*(% Return On Capital).

GMV = Gross Market Value, basically the amount of money you can trade (or the total value of your longs + shorts).

You control the % Return and the firm decides how much GMV to give you.

GMV is perhaps the part of PM compensation that can change the most during your career.

A newer PM may be allocated $150-300mm. But as you prove yourself worthy the firm will dump more capital on you.

And the most senior PMs at these shops typically manage around $5 bln (or more)!

Big number.

Alright one last piece: what's a reasonable % Return you can expect to make? 10%? 20%? 100%?

This is an interesting question and perhaps deserves its own discussion.

But the % return a decent quant PM can make in “Statistical Arbitrage” strategies over the long term is actually, conservatively, around 2-4% on GMV.

Given the risk controls on these portfolios, that actually turns out to be a Sharpe of 1-2 which is a respectable outcome for a single PM over a multi-year horizon.

Again, there's a whole separate discussion involving leverage and uncorrelated returns that actually makes this 2-4% return on GMV meaningful.

But we're talking compensation here.

Real Quant PM Compensation Examples

So onto the juicy part…let's plug some numbers into our formula Bonus = GMV*(% Return)*(% Cut):

These are only two sets of hypothetical numbers under two sets of extreme assumptions, but roughly summarizes quant PM compensation.

A fresh PM can expect to earn around a million in bonus, which is already pretty awesome.

Over time, though, this can grow into a multi 8-figure take home pay that hits that $30mm number of Mr. Dimon himself!

In a banger-year with 4%+ in returns, a Quant could in theory out-earn Dimon significantly.

And that makes some sense given Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel personally took home $4.1 billion in 2022 (Source).

Now, $30mm is a truly exceptional outcome.

At the other extreme, if you make 0 % Returns, yes you get 0 Bonus. (But still have that $250k base...not bad!).

In reality most will land in the range of $1-10mm with the possibility to breakout to that $30mm+ mark.

Conclusion

What's really unique about this industry is that the compensation is very transparent and can be written down in a simple 3 variable formula: GMV*(% Return)*(% Cut).

It's also very meritocratic.

Your % Return directly factors into your pay. And as the firm sees that you're putting up good percent returns, they'll increase your % Cut and your GMV.

There's much less BS and politicking (although some of that is unavoidable). Mostly, you just live and die by the % Returns you put up.

And the sky's the limit!

Alright, that's it for now. If you want to learn more about kick-starting your quant career, book a free consult with us today. Otherwise, till next time!