Investment banks are having a good run. Revenues are strong, bonuses are up, and deal flow is recovering. Junior bankers’ benefits have been stripped back anyway — and the conditions that might once have forced their return look structurally weaker than before.
Sometime in mid-2023, a major Wall Street bank quietly changed its meal allowance policy. Analysts who had been able to order dinner to their homes on late working nights found the stipend restricted to office delivery only. No announcement was made. No explanation was given. The change simply appeared in the expenses system one week, and that was that.
It was, in microcosm, the story of investment banking perks over the past two years: incremental, undramatic, and almost impossible to argue with. One policy at a time, one bank at a time, the benefits introduced during the hiring frenzy of 2021 and 2022 have been quietly dismantled. The process is now largely complete.
The timing is notable. This is not a story of an industry in distress.
The Banks Are Doing Well
To understand the perk rollback in its proper context, the starting point is that investment banking had a strong run in 2024 and 2025. Global investment banking revenue surpassed $100 billion in 2025 — the second-highest total since 2021, according to Dealogic. M&A deal volumes rose 20 to 50 per cent in some regions across 2024 and 2025. Wall Street’s total bonus pool hit a record $49.2 billion in 2025, up 9 per cent on the previous year and the highest in nominal terms on record, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. The average bonus on Wall Street rose 6 per cent to $246,900. Goldman Sachs’ Q1 2025 results showed record equities revenues of $4.19 billion. JPMorgan’s investment banking fees rose 28 per cent in Q1 2026 to $2.88 billion.
Senior bankers are being rewarded handsomely for this recovery. End-of-year 2025 bonuses rose roughly 25 per cent or more for managing directors, and 10 to 15 per cent for VPs and directors, according to compensation consultancy Mergers & Inquisitions. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and President John Waldron were each awarded $80 million in retention bonuses earlier in 2025. Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan earned $35 million, a 21 per cent increase year on year.
For analysts and associates, the same recovery produced a 5 per cent increase in total compensation. Investment banking fees rose 10 to 20 per cent. Junior bankers received one-fifth of that uplift.
The Rollback, Item by Item
Against this backdrop, the dismantling of junior banker perks has proceeded steadily. The most visible changes have been in return-to-office policy. In January 2025, JPMorgan Chase announced that almost all of its employees would be required to work from the office five days a week, bringing it in line with Goldman Sachs, which had maintained that expectation since 2021 and spent much of 2023 and 2024 enforcing it with renewed seriousness. BNY called its managers back to four days in early 2025, with all other staff to follow. By mid-2025, the era of hybrid working in investment banking was, for most analysts and associates, effectively over.
The food followed the flexibility. Goldman Sachs reduced its complimentary breakfast and lunch options, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Mizuho cut its dinner budget from $45 to $35 per analyst after monitoring revealed some were ordering two meals. Barclays tightened its allowance rules, requiring analysts to remain in the office until 9pm to claim their dinner stipend — even when they had been at their desks since early morning. And UBS moved to go further still: the Swiss bank is reportedly preparing to eliminate its late-night meal allowance altogether, a decision framed internally as a consequence of AI tools enabling analysts to finish work earlier. Most analysts receiving that message have treated it with scepticism.
Wellness budgets, which had expanded at several banks in 2022 and 2023 to cover gym memberships, mental health apps and personal development, have been quietly compressed or not renewed. Summer Fridays have been phased out at most firms, the logic being, as one HR consultant put it, that “if you’re already working from home on Mondays and Fridays and I’m already not getting the level of output I want, why would I reduce your schedule even more?”
Surgical, Not Structural
The other defining shift of the past two years is in how banks manage headcount. The era of large-scale, headline-grabbing reductions in force — of the kind that periodically swept Wall Street after 2008 — has given way to something more continuous and more deliberate.
Goldman Sachs is the clearest example. The bank has replaced its once-annual large culling with rolling cuts distributed across the year and across all business lines, typically removing between 2 and 7 per cent of its workforce through what it describes as a “normal, annual talent management process.” When market conditions in early 2025 were better than feared, Goldman explicitly opted against a second round of cuts — the decision calibrated to performance rather than driven by structural necessity. JPMorgan’s approach has similarly focused on “selective cuts and performance management rather than broad workforce reductions,” according to people familiar with the bank’s strategy.
This matters because cuts framed as performance-based carry a different message than market-driven ones. In 2022 and 2023, a banker being let go could reasonably attribute it to industry-wide headwinds. In 2025, with revenues strong and the market largely recovered, the same outcome is harder to explain away. The implicit signal is sharpened: it is about you, not the cycle.
The Great Hunkering Down
The perk rollback and the shift to performance-based management share an underlying cause. Workers are staying put — and they are staying put because they are nervous.
Economists have begun calling the current moment the “Great Hunkering Down”: a counterpart, and a corrective, to the Great Resignation of 2021. The US quit rate, which measures the proportion of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs each month, peaked at around 3 per cent during the post-pandemic hiring boom. It has since fallen to 1.9 per cent — the lowest reading outside the pandemic in roughly a decade. Inside investment banks, the effect is even more pronounced. Staff turnover at Bank of America ran at just 8 per cent in 2024, against a historical norm of more than 12 per cent.
The anxiety is not irrational. The graduate jobs market has deteriorated: at Harvard Business School, the share of MBA graduates without a job offer within three months rose from 4 per cent in 2021 to 15 per cent by 2024. AI-related uncertainty has added another layer, with regular warnings about automation displacing entry-level analytical roles making junior bankers reluctant to test a market they fear may have fewer places for them. And for those who relocated during the pandemic, domestic arrangements have made mobility harder still.
“Right now, it’s a slow-hiring, slow-quits economy,” said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank. Banks have cut perks, and no one has left.
No Room to Move Up
For those who do decide to move, the market has become significantly more demanding — and the direction of travel has narrowed. The era of “uptiering” — of a banker at a mid-market or regional firm moving to a bulge bracket or elite boutique — has effectively stalled.
Elite investment banks are aggressively poaching proven mid-level bankers from direct competitors, focusing almost exclusively on clean lateral transitions from comparable platforms. The appetite for candidates seeking to step up from less prestigious firms is sharply reduced. “Every major bank is essentially hunting for the same unicorn candidate,” noted one senior recruiter, describing the preference for employed, immediately productive bankers with public M&A experience at scale. The average deal over $1 billion has grown as a share of the market — from 22 per cent of transactions in the pre-pandemic period to 27 per cent in 2025 — and banks want people who have already worked at that level, not those who are trying to break into it.
The practical consequence is that the traditional escape valve for a dissatisfied junior banker — the move to a better firm — has become harder to execute. The pipeline of genuine opportunities is thinner, and the bar to clear it has risen. “In 2021, you just needed bodies — more horsepower,” said one senior recruiter. “This is very different. Banks are looking for professionals who can add value from day one.” For a second-year associate at a mid-tier bank weighing up whether to push back on a meal stipend cut or a five-day office mandate, the calculus is straightforward: the cost of objecting is clearer than the prospect of finding something better.
The Hours Have Not Improved
What might make the perk rollback more palatable is if it came alongside any meaningful improvement in working conditions. It has not.
The past two years brought a series of events that forced the industry to confront, at least briefly, the human cost of its hours culture. In May 2024, Leo Lukenas, a 35-year-old former Green Beret who had joined Bank of America’s investment banking division, died of a blood clot after working more than 100 hours a week for a month on a $2 billion acquisition, Reuters confirmed with the New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. A subsequent Wall Street Journal investigation found that Bank of America supervisors had been routinely pressuring junior bankers to underreport their hours — a decade after the bank had made similar promises of reform following the death of a 21-year-old intern at its London office in 2013. In January 2025, Carter McIntosh, a 28-year-old associate at Jefferies in Dallas, died in circumstances that, according to Bloomberg, reignited the industry debate over working conditions.
Both banks introduced reforms in response. JPMorgan capped junior banker hours at 80 per week in most cases — confirmed by the company to Fortune — while Bank of America launched a new daily time-tracking tool requiring detailed activity logs, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Exceptions to JPMorgan’s cap were carved out for live deals, which is precisely when hours are longest. JPMorgan also guaranteed junior analysts one full weekend off — every three months, according to Fortune.
A survey of more than 500 banking professionals conducted by Wall Street Oasis and published in early 2025 found respondents reported a 22 per cent decline in mental health and a 26 per cent decline in physical health since starting their current roles. Average bedtime had improved from 1.35am in 2021 to 12.29am in 2024. The direction of travel is right. The destination remains some distance away.
What Comes Next
The current dynamic rests on a particular set of conditions — a recovered but not overheating deal market, a cautious labor force, and a pool of senior talent that is being well rewarded while junior staff absorb the cost discipline. It will not hold indefinitely in its current form.
When deal volumes accelerate to the point that banks genuinely need to expand junior headcount — rather than simply replacing selectively — the competition for talent will return. The banks that have spent the past two years quietly removing stipends, enforcing five-day weeks, and compressing wellness budgets will find those decisions reversed, probably in a hurry. It has happened before, in 2020 and 2021, when a shortage of junior talent produced exactly the perk expansion that is now being unwound.
Whether that moment arrives in 2026 or 2027 is unclear. What is clear is that the industry is, for now, operating in an unusual combination of strong revenues, disciplined headcount management, concentrated upside at senior levels, and stagnant conditions for those at the bottom. The firms are performing. The junior bankers are hunkering down. And the gap between those two facts grows quietly wider.
Data sources include the US Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS survey, the New York State Comptroller’s annual bonus estimate, Dealogic global IB revenue data, eFinancialCareers compensation and lifestyle reports, Wall Street Oasis practitioner surveys, Goldman Sachs SEC filings, Johnson Associates compensation reports and reporting from the Financial Times, Fortune, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.