Jane Street booked $16.1bn of trading revenue and $10.3bn of net income in the first quarter of 2026. Both figures more than doubled against the same quarter a year earlier, and that single quarter came to more than 40% of the firm’s entire prior year.
That is the pool. Every offer letter handed to a 22-year-old, every pod payout wired to a 34-year-old portfolio manager, and every retention package written to stop a 41-year-old walking into an AI lab is drawn from revenue lines that behave like that one.
Firm-by-firm career paths, progression structures and compensation mechanics are mapped in detail at QuantFinanceWiki.com.
Almost everyone entering the industry models their own earnings as a smooth exponential. Four hundred thousand at 22, a million by 30, several million by 40.
The actual curve is a step function. It has three discontinuities, and the position of each one is decided by structural features of the compensation model rather than by technical ability.
What follows is what the twenty-three years between 22 and 45 pay, when the money stops being cash, and which decisions move the terminal number by an order of magnitude.
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Jane Street lists $300,000 as the base salary on its New York quantitative researcher posting, before any bonus. First-year totals in New York run $400,000 to $700,000 once base, signing, first-year guarantee and bonus are combined. The same seat in London runs £250,000 to £500,000.
Two Sigma‘s campus-hire posting carries a base band of $200,000 to $220,000, with London packages between £195,000 and £285,000. Citadel reaches an entry-level total near $336,000, with the researcher-population median closer to $396,000. IMC Trading‘s conversion offer for returning interns came to roughly $425,000 for the 2024 cohort.
New York carries a premium of roughly 10% to 20% over London at the same level. Most of that premium disappears once housing and tax are netted against it.
The headline total is the figure that circulates every recruiting cycle. The figure that governs these three years is the guarantee.
For analysts, technologists and quant developers, first-cycle guarantees typically run 25% to 100% of base salary. Most funds require a start before roughly September to qualify for the full first-year amount, and an October start pro-rates it accordingly.
The guarantee is the only period in a quant career when compensation is decoupled from output. Everything after it is priced off production.
Two structural facts sit underneath these years that the offer screenshots never carry.
The first is that the gap between firms at the junior level is far narrower than the ranges suggest. A $336,000 Citadel offer and a $500,000 Jane Street offer represent a difference that gets erased or reversed by year five, depending entirely on what happens inside the seat.
The second is attrition. Roughly 40% of junior quants do not survive their first year in the role they were hired into. The failures concentrate in the transition from academic research habits to production research habits. Mathematical ability is rarely the binding constraint at this stage, and firms screen for it heavily enough that it has already been priced.
After year one the guarantee disappears completely.
Bonuses revert to discretionary appraisal for non-P&L roles and to formulaic payout for revenue-generating ones. For most quant researchers the bonus then represents 40% to 70% of total compensation, and at senior levels it runs two to three times base salary.
This is the first discontinuity in the curve.
Two people who signed identical $450,000 offers at 22 are separated by a factor of two or three by 27. The separation is driven almost entirely by whether they have production signals carrying live capital, and it happens without either person changing employer.
The second feature of this window is that a growing share of the headline number stops being cash.
Citadel requires employees to invest half of bonuses above an undisclosed threshold into the Wellington Fund for 3.5 years.
Qube defers up to 75% of discretionary bonuses for three years into its own funds.
Point72 runs 25% or less on three-year vesting for some employees.
BlueCrest uses three-year deferrals as standard.
Balyasny pays entirely in cash, which is the outlier across the platforms and the firm’s explicit recruiting argument.
Deferral is a retention instrument priced to the candidate as compensation.
A researcher quoting a $900,000 package at 27 against a 50% three-year deferral into house funds holds a present value materially below that number. They also hold it in an instrument that loses most of its negotiating value the moment they resign, since the unvested portion becomes something a competitor has to buy out rather than something the candidate can bank.
Raising the cost of leaving is the entire design intent.
The practical consequence is that lateral moves at 26 and 27 get negotiated on the size of the deferral buyout rather than on the new base salary. Candidates who price only the base walk into a move that pays them less for two years and reads as a promotion on paper.
This is where the curve splits permanently. The split runs between two compensation models rather than between two job titles.
Senior researchers at Citadel, Two Sigma, D.E. Shaw, Jane Street and Renaissance routinely clear $700,000 and frequently pass seven figures. A principal researcher at a top fund sits near $600,000 in a flat year.
The distribution here is compressed at both ends. The floor is high and it holds through weak years, because the compensation is appraisal-driven and the appraisal covers research contribution rather than a single P&L line.
The PM path replaces the appraisal with an equation.
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