Compensation data for quantitative finance is out in full force this cycle, sourced from H1B filings, intern salary disclosures, self-reported community threads, and a leaked pay grade structure from inside one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. What follows is a complete breakdown of where quant pay actually sits in 2025, segmented by role, seniority, geography, and firm type.

Base Salaries: What the H1B Filings Show

The H1B salary database is the closest thing to verifiable ground truth available for US-based quant compensation, and the 2025 data covers over 270 quantitative researcher data points filed since the start of the year.

The national average base salary for a quant researcher in the United States sits at $190,310, with New York coming in slightly higher at $197,753. Miami, despite being a smaller market, leads all US cities at $242,353.

Five Rings and Jane Street share the top position in the H1B dataset, both paying quant researchers a flat $300,000 base salary. Five Rings filed eight H1B quant researcher applications since the start of 2024, every one at exactly $300k, all in New York, and current job listings confirm this is a firm-wide policy rather than a negotiated outcome for specific hires.

Five Rings paid $1.06 million per employee to its London office in 2024 despite recording an $11 million loss for the year, which reflects a deliberate choice to hold onto senior talent regardless of short-term fund performance.

Jane Street’s $300k figure applies across its researcher category, which covers quant traders, quant researchers, machine learning engineers, FPGA engineers, and several engineering specialties. Jane Street paid an average of $1.4 million per employee across its full global workforce in 2024.

The rest of the H1B rankings, ordered by average quant researcher base salary:

• Citadel Securities: $257,250

• Point72: $247,500 (with individual IAC researchers reaching $400,000)

• TGS Management: $238,167

• Jump Trading: $232,917

• Citadel: $232,550

• Two Sigma: $230,882

• Laurion Capital Management: $225,000

• Chicago Trading Company: $208,333

• Maven Securities: $206,250

• IMC: $206,250

• Balyasny: $203,636

• D.E. Shaw: $200,000

• Brevan Howard: $200,000

• Quantbot Technologies: $200,000

• Aquatic Capital: $195,000

One critical limitation of this data: hedge funds are known to avoid the H1B lottery for their highest-value quant hires, meaning the dataset skews toward external hires from banks or large tech firms.

The most senior employees who hold green cards, O-1A visas, or were developed internally from undergraduate hiring pipelines do not appear in this data at all. The figures above represent a floor, not a ceiling, for what top firms actually pay their quant researchers.

Intern Compensation: The Figures Are Verifiable

New York labor law requires salary disclosure on intern job postings, which provides an unusually clean view of what electronic trading firms pay students for a few months of work.

Optiver posts the highest disclosed total compensation for PhD quant research interns at $80,000 to $90,000 for the internship period. If the placement runs eight weeks, that works out to $11,250 per week in total compensation.

XTX Markets posts the highest base salary for any intern role in the dataset: its AI Research internship pays $35,000 per month in base salary, equivalent to $8,750 per week, over a 12 to 14 week placement. A student who completes the full period earns up to $122,500 in base salary alone before any sign-on components.

Jane Street pays the majority of its interns the annualized equivalent of $300,000, applied consistently across quant traders, quant researchers, machine learning engineers, FPGA engineers, network engineers, and Windows engineers.

Hudson River Trading discloses a $25,000 signing bonus on top of its Python Software Engineer intern salary, bringing the reported weekly total to approximately $5,800.

IMC Trading pays interns up to $5,800 per week in base salary. IMC’s conversion offer for interns who return as full-time graduates was approximately $425,000 in total compensation for the 2024 cohort.

Citadel Securities offers interns the choice between a $15,000 housing stipend or firm-arranged premium housing, in addition to base pay of around $4,800 per week.

These are not rounding-error differences between firms. Optiver’s PhD intern earning $11,250 per week and a bank intern earning $2,000 per week for the same number of hours represent a structural divergence in how these industries value early technical talent, and the conversion packages that follow an electronic trading internship often lock in total compensation figures before the student graduates.

IIT Graduates: A Specific Talent Pipeline Worth Understanding

The average salary for an IIT graduate across all industries is approximately $19,700. The highest offers from electronic trading firms to IIT graduates exceed $500,000, a multiple of more than 25 over that average.

An IIT graduate who joined Jane Street in Hong Kong in 2024 received a total compensation package of $508,000. Intern offers from electronic trading firms to IIT candidates have reached $20,000 per month excluding sign-on bonuses, which is the documented going rate at IMC Trading in the US according to verified filings on Levels.fyi.

The firms most actively recruiting from IITs include Tower Research Capital, Optiver (which opened a Mumbai office in 2024), IMC (targeting 150 employees in India by end of 2025), and Jane Street, which hired graduates from IIT Bombay, Delhi, and Madras for its 2026 class. Over 1,000 math and engineering graduates from quant finance firms work out of a single building in Gurugram called Two Horizon Centre, which houses Tower Research, Citadel Securities, and several local firms.

The IIT entrance exam structure is what makes this pipeline valuable to trading firms specifically. It selects for speed, accuracy under pressure, and competitive performance, qualities that transfer directly to quantitative research interview formats and to the daily requirements of live trading and strategy development. The top five schools by quant finance placement are IIT Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Madras, and Kharagpur, which together account for over 680 verified LinkedIn profiles at major trading firms and hedge funds.

Pay for IIT graduates placed at top electronic trading firms matches what US and European graduates at the same firms receive. The recruiting is not a cost-reduction strategy; it is a talent-access strategy targeting a pool of candidates that the standard US and UK university circuit does not reach.

ADIA Team Q: No Bonuses, But the Salaries Are Real

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority’s Quantitative Research and Development team has grown from approximately 50 people in 2022 to roughly 150 today. Compensation in Team Q is structured entirely as salary, with no bonus component at any level, in a jurisdiction where income tax is zero.

The five pay grades, Q1 through Q5, are understood to pay as follows:

• Q1: $100,000 to $150,000

• Q2: $200,000 to $350,000

• Q3: $500,000 to $800,000

• Q4: $1,000,000 to $2,000,000

• Q5: $3,000,000 and above

The Q4 and Q5 salary ranges exceed what most quant researchers at US pod shops earn in total compensation in an average performance year, and those figures arrive as guaranteed, non-variable base pay in a zero-income-tax environment. The effective take-home differential relative to a $1,000,000 total compensation package in New York or London is substantial.

Marcos Lopez de Prado, formerly a partner at AQR and head of quantitative research at Tudor Investment Corp, joined ADIA in 2022 and serves as the public face of Team Q. His published work covers LLM applications in finance, private equity valuation methodology, and Sharpe ratio construction. The operational authority within Team Q is understood to sit with Majed Alromaithi, who oversees the strategy and planning department that governs Team Q’s budget and direction.

Team Q’s primary function is centralized portfolio allocation, specifically making tactical asset allocation decisions across ADIA’s global holdings that total over $1 trillion in assets under management. It is not a hedge fund structure where researchers run books against a benchmark. The environment is closer to a systematic research operation at a central bank than to the pod-shop structure at Millennium or Citadel, and the retention profile reflects that: departures from Team Q tend to land in academic roles or at other sovereign wealth funds rather than at US hedge funds.

Around 30 people joined Team Q in the past year, and the team is still actively hiring data scientists, machine learning researchers and engineers, systematic portfolio managers, and quantitative engineers.

Self-Reported Total Compensation: The Full Spectrum

Self-reported compensation data carries sampling bias toward higher earners and toward people at larger, more well-known firms. With that limitation stated, the figures below represent documented self-reports from identifiable role types at named firm categories, covering a wide range of seniority levels.

0 to 2 Years Experience

The first-year total compensation range at top-tier electronic trading firms and large prop shops spans from approximately $350,000 to over $1,000,000, depending on the firm, the candidate’s competing offers, and whether the hire was a returning intern. A breakdown of first-year comp components that appears consistently across the data:

• Base salary: $150,000 to $300,000

• Sign-on bonus: $50,000 to $200,000

• Guaranteed performance bonus (year one): $75,000 to $150,000

Specific reported packages from verified community posts:

Quant Researcher, Large Prop Firm, NYC, 0-1 YoE:

• Base: $275,000

• Bonus: $500,000 ($250,000 sign-on plus $250,000 year-end)

• Hours: 40 per week

Quant Trader, HFT Firm, UK, 0-2 YoE:

• Base: £175,000

• Bonus: £175,000

• Hours: approximately 55 per week

Quant Trader, Prop Firm, US, 2 YoE:

• Total Compensation: $650,000

• Hours: 45 to 50 per week

QT, One of JS/CitSec/Jump/HRT, NYC, 2.5 YoE:

• Base: $200,000

• Bonus: $1,300,000

• Hours: 60 to 65 per week

Options Market Maker, EU, QT, 1-2 YoE:

• Base: €100,000

• Bonus: €160,000

• Hours: 50 to 55 per week

QT, Top Prop, UK, 0-2 YoE, converted from grad hire:

• Base: £300,000 in year one (as described by a 5-7 YoE QT at the same firm type)

2 to 5 Years Experience

The second-year compensation reality is important to state clearly. Sign-on bonuses do not repeat, and if a researcher has not generated measurable PnL contribution by year two, total compensation often drops relative to year one even when base salary holds flat. The variable bonus becomes the primary lever, and it ties directly to demonstrable output.

Quant Researcher, Pod Shop (Millennium/Balyasny/Schonfeld tier), US, 4 YoE:

• Base: $175,000

• Bonus: $400,000

• Hours: 45 per week

Quant Researcher, Multi-Manager HF, US, 3 YoE:

• Base: $250,000

• Bonus: approximately $700,000

• Hours: 40 to 45 per week

Quant Researcher, Big Prop, NYC, 3-5 YoE:

• Base: $300,000

• Expected Bonus: approximately $4,000,000

• Hours: 50 to 55 per week

This last figure requires context. The same researcher stated explicitly that “there are people at my experience level making approximately $10,000,000,” and also noted that their bonus amounts to “low single digits of what I generate” for the firm. At centralized prop shops, researchers do not receive a PM-style 15 to 20 percent PnL cut; the firm takes the large majority of the strategy’s output and pays the researcher a negotiated fixed bonus that reflects their contribution rather than a percentage of it.

Quant Trader, Large Prop, US, 5 YoE:

• Base: $200,000

• Bonus: $900,000

• Hours: 45 per week

Quant Trader, One of Jane/CitSec/Jump/HRT/DRW, London, 5-7 YoE:

• Total Compensation 2024: £1,500,000

• Total Compensation 2025: £2,000,000

• Hours: 50 to 55 per week

Quant Researcher, HF, NYC, approximately 5 YoE:

• Base: $200,000

• Bonus: $375,000

• Hours: 30 to 50 per week depending on project load

Quant Researcher, Centralized HF (DE Shaw/Two Sigma/QRT type), Remote, 5 YoE:

• Base: €250,000

• Bonus: €350,000

• Hours: 30 to 40 per week

A verified account from a buyside professional with direct knowledge of top prop shop compensation describes the second-year range as $375,000 to $500,000 with standard performance and $650,000 to $820,000 with strong performance, before the third year begins to open up more meaningful upside for researchers who have built live, profitable strategies.

5 to 10 Years Experience

HFT Prop, USA, Dev/Researcher Hybrid, 6 YoE:

• Base: $250,000

• Bonus: $600,000 (distributed over 8 quarters)

• Hours: 40 to 50 per week

Quant Researcher, Multi-Strat, NYC, 7 YoE:

• Base: $190,000

• Bonus: $700,000

• Hours: 40 to 50 per week

Managing Director, Bank, Chicago, 7 YoE, QR/QD hybrid:

• Base: $325,000

• Bonus: $1,000,000

• Hours: 50 per week

Quant Trader, Large Quant Firm, London, 7-12 YoE:

• Total Compensation: £1,200,000

• Hours: 60 to 70 per week

QD, Multi-Strat HF, London, 7 YoE:

• Base: £250,000

• Bonus: £130,000

• Hours: 40 to 50 per week

The 5-year benchmark in quantitative finance carries real meaning for those at top-tier prop shops. A verified account from a buyside professional with direct knowledge of the compensation structures at these firms describes the distribution at the 5-year mark as follows:

• Standard performance (median of survivors): $800,000 to $1,200,000

• Poor performance: $475,000 to $625,000

• Strong performance: $2,000,000 to $4,000,000

The phrase “median of survivors” is precise and intentional. The pool of people who remain employed as active researchers or traders at firms like Jump, Jane Street, or Citadel after five years is not a random sample of their original hiring cohort. The attrition rate over that period filters out everyone who was not generating sufficient value to justify continued employment at those compensation levels, which means the $800,000 to $1,200,000 figure belongs to the subset of an already-elite group that cleared the five-year threshold.

10 Years and Beyond

QT, Top Prop Firm (Jump-tier), USA, 10 YoE:

• Base: $250,000

• Bonus: $2,750,000

• Hours: 60 per week

QD with Significant PnL Contribution, Large Prop, NYC, approximately 10 YoE:

• Base: approximately $400,000

• Bonus: approximately $4,000,000

Quant Trader, NYC Prop, 5-7 YoE:

• Total Compensation: $8,000,000 to $12,000,000

• Hours: 45 to 50 per week

Portfolio Manager, Prop, USA, 10 YoE:

• Total Compensation: approximately $1,400,000

QD in Leadership, Top Tier HF, 15-20 YoE:

• Base: $225,000

• Bonus: $900,000

QR, Large HF, UK, 7 YoE:

• Total Compensation including deferred: £1,200,000

• Hours: 50 per week

At the 8-year mark, the same buyside compensation data describes the following ranges for those who have survived to that point:

• Standard performance: $1,600,000 to $3,800,000

• Poor performance: $900,000 to $1,800,000

• Strong performance: $8,000,000 and above

Beyond the 8-year mark, compensation becomes highly individual and highly tied to specific strategy performance rather than to any general seniority scale. A researcher at a top prop shop who has been generating $30,000,000 or more per year in PnL for several consecutive years is in a negotiating position that has very little to do with the numbers discussed elsewhere in this piece. That is the right tail of the distribution, and it is real, but it represents a small fraction of the people who entered the same firms at the same time.

QR vs QD vs QT: How Compensation Structures Differ