The headlines this winter looked like good news for anyone waiting on a promotion. Goldman Sachs named 638 new managing directors in November — the biggest class since 2021. JPMorgan promoted 227 in its commercial and investment bank in April 2025, the largest CIB class in years. Bank of America hit 394 in December, the fifth straight year of growth. Morgan Stanley followed in January 2026 with 184. Citi was the only outlier, dropping to 276 from the prior year’s 344.
If you’re a VP or Director who’s been told your year is coming, those numbers feel like vindication. The post-2023 freeze must be breaking. The bottleneck must be opening up.
It isn’t — at least not for the readers of this site who sit in coverage and product groups.
The headline numbers are real, but they mask a different story underneath. The number of advisory and capital markets bankers getting promoted to MD has been flat to declining for three straight years at most banks. Some of that is a composition shift — banks promoting more in tech and wealth — but the bigger driver is that they spent 2024 and 2025 importing senior MDs laterally at an aggressive pace. Every external hire is an internal promotion that didn’t happen.
I wrote in December 2025 about why lateral recruiting in your promotion year almost never works, and laid out the case that the 2025-2027 promotion environment was likely to stay frozen because of the 2024 MD hiring spree. The 2025 promotion data is now in. It confirms the freeze — but only if you know where to look.
The Lateral Hiring Numbers Tell the Real Story
In 2024, US lateral MD hiring across the major banks was modest and dispersed, tracking roughly in line with prior years and reflecting a post-2023 hangover.
In 2025, that pattern broke. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, RBC, and UBS each reportedly doubled or more than doubled their external IB MD hiring versus 2024. JPMorgan, Citi, and Barclays increased hiring dramatically. Wells Fargo was the largest single hirer, ending the year with 21 more MDs than it began — and head of corporate and investment banking Fernando Rivas told the Financial Times the bank intends to add 25-30 more in 2026, and 25-30 more in 2027, on top of the 125 IB MDs Wells has hired since 2019.
The cumulative effect: roughly 175-185 external IB MDs landing at Wells Fargo alone over an eight-year period, with the back half of that hiring concentrated in 2024-2027. And Wells is just one bank.
Those hires didn’t go to support functions or technology. They went to coverage and product groups — M&A, sponsors, healthcare, tech IB, leveraged finance, energy. The exact groups where internal VPs and Directors were waiting on MD promotions. When you import 20 senior MDs into a coverage group during the year, you don’t need to promote 20 internal candidates. The slots are full. The bank still wants to grow its MD ranks — for headline numbers, morale, competitive positioning — so it promotes in places where lateral pressure isn’t competing with internal talent. That means technology, wealth management, services, transformation. The headline class grows. The internal pipeline in coverage stagnates. Both things happen at the same time, and they’re causally linked.
Bank of America Is the Cleanest Case
If you want to see the mechanism in numbers, look at BofA. Their total MD class went from 334 in 2023 to 387 in 2024 to 394 in 2025 — up 18% over two years. By the headline number, BofA looks like a place where senior promotions are open and accelerating.
Pull the data apart by division and the story reverses.
Combined Investment Banking and Capital Markets MD promotions at BofA were 45 in 2023, 37 in 2024, and 44 in 2025. Three years in, the dealmaker count is still below where it was in 2023. Global Markets sales and trading promotions went 65, 65, then 48 over the same period — flat for two years and then declining. The people generating the bank’s deal revenue and trading revenue accounted for roughly 110 promotions in 2023 and 92 in 2025. Fewer, not more.
Where did the headline growth come from? Technology. BofA’s tech MDs went from 17 in 2024 to 40 in 2025, more than doubling in a single year. The bank is spending $13 billion on technology with $4 billion of that earmarked for AI, and it has every reason to grow its tech MD ranks.
Meanwhile, BofA was one of the banks reportedly doubling its external IB MD hiring in 2025. The firm grew its MD ranks — but the growth happened in the divisions where it wasn’t filling coverage seats from outside.
The Squeeze Looks Different at Every Bank
The BofA pattern isn’t universal. Different banks are squeezing different groups, and one stands apart from the rest. Here’s how the major players actually break down.
Citi is the most directly squeezed. The 2025 class came in at 276, down 20% from 2024’s 344 — the smallest class in five years per Bloomberg. Of the 2025 class, 173 went to the four front-office businesses: markets (55), banking (45), wealth (40), and services (33). The remaining 100-plus were in support and transformation roles. Tech MDs at Citi were halved, from about 30 in 2024 to 15 in 2025, as the bank prioritized hiring full-time tech employees over promoting MDs in that division. Industry tracking shows Citi ended 2025 down 8 MDs net externally — meaning more senior bankers walked out than were hired in. Citi imported aggressively in 2024 (Viswas Raghavan, among others), and the 2025 internal pull-back is partly the consequence. If you’re at Citi, the squeeze isn’t subtle.
Morgan Stanley sits in the middle. The 2026 class of 184 was up from 173 in 2025 and 155 in 2024. The Institutional Securities Group share — the IB-relevant subset — has risen from 40% in 2023 to 48% in 2026, meaning roughly 88 ISG promotions in this most recent class versus 74 in 2023. Modestly better than flat, but the firmwide growth is still being driven by Wealth Management. Morgan Stanley also reportedly doubled its external MD hiring in 2025, so the modest internal ISG growth happened against a backdrop of heavy lateral imports — meaning the squeeze is there even if the absolute numbers grew.
Goldman Sachs is the hardest to read. The 2025 class of 638 was the largest since 2021’s 643. Goldman disclosed that more than 70% came from revenue-generating divisions (Global Banking & Markets plus Asset & Wealth Management), but didn’t break out banking versus markets versus AWM. That’s wide enough to obscure a lot. Based on the 2023 class breakdown — where 47% came from IB + Markets — a similar ratio applied to 2025 would put the IB + Markets count somewhere around 300. Up from 286 in 2023, but Goldman also imported senior bankers laterally during the same period, so the internal pipeline is under more pressure than the headline reflects.
JPMorgan is the exception. The CIB class hit 227 in April 2025 (with 184 in core revenue businesses and 43 in support functions), and the just-announced April 2026 banking and markets class came in at 135 — up from 118 in 2025 and 116 in 2024 on a comparable scope. JPM was more selective than peers in 2024 lateral hiring, and the data shows they earned room to promote internally. Of the major bulge brackets, JPM is the one bank where the headline numbers genuinely correlate with stronger internal odds for dealmakers.
The takeaway: among the five biggest US bulge brackets, one bank (JPMorgan) is genuinely promoting more dealmakers, two (Morgan Stanley, Goldman) are roughly flat with growth masked by other divisions, and two (BofA, Citi) are squeezing the dealmaker pipeline while their headline numbers tell a different story. The pattern correlates with how aggressively each bank hired laterally heading into 2025.
How to Read Your Own Bank
When your bank announces next year’s class, the headline number is the least useful piece of information. Here’s what to look at instead.
The front-office share. Find out what percentage of new MDs went to your specific business line versus support, technology, wealth, and transformation. The press releases rarely make this easy, but Reuters, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and eFinancialCareers usually have the breakdowns within 48 hours. If your bank’s headline class grew 10% but front-office promotions only grew 2%, that’s a tell.
Your own group’s count. This matters more than the firmwide number. A 50-person M&A coverage team that promoted three people last year and one this year is in a freeze, regardless of what the firmwide announcement says. Talk to peers across coverage groups to triangulate.
Lateral hires into your group during the year. This is the variable that nobody discusses but everyone should. If your bank brought in two senior MDs from a competitor in 2025, those people filled slots that would otherwise have been internal promotion seats. Lateral pressure isn’t visible in the promotion announcement, but it’s the most important factor in your actual odds.
The bank’s net external MD movement. Industry recruiting reports track this for the US market, and the 2025 numbers are public: which banks doubled their external MD hiring, which lost MDs net, which gained. If your bank was on the heavy-hire list, the firmwide promotion class growth is partially absorbing those imports — meaning fewer slots for you, even if the headline number looks generous.
If three of those four indicators are flashing red for your situation, the headline class growth is not a signal for you. It’s a signal for someone else.
What the Numbers Are Actually Telling You
The lateral MD hiring spree of 2024-2025 was supposed to fade as banks digested their hires. It hasn’t. Wells Fargo’s commitment to another 50-60 lateral MDs through 2027 will keep pressure on the bulge brackets at the senior level. Morgan Stanley and BofA’s heavy 2025 external hiring is still working its way through their internal pipelines. Citi is bleeding senior talent to competitors who are still hiring.
This is what I described in the September 2024 piece on the challenges of getting promoted in investment banking as the cascading bottleneck — except the 2025 data shows it’s now reaching the most senior level too. Directors waiting on MD aren’t just competing with each other anymore. They’re competing with the lateral hires their bank made during the year, and they’re competing for slots that the firm has every incentive to fill in tech and wealth instead of M&A coverage.
The promotion you’re waiting on may still come. But it isn’t coming because the headline number went up. It’ll come because your specific group, at your specific bank, has the headcount room — and increasingly few groups at the bulge brackets actually do, because banks spent the last two years filling those seats laterally.
Read your own bank’s announcement with that in mind, and you’ll know what the press release actually says about you. And if you’ve already concluded it isn’t saying anything good — here’s the playbook for what to do next.